The year’s last rain had fallen and the power of the summer sun was fresh
on all the land. With thanks to Allah, the little party of travelers
approached the region of great trees in the highland beyond Es-Salt. Mâs,
walking beside the litter which contained Fatmeh, wiped his face with his
hand repeatedly and shook off the drops thus reaped upon the ground.
“It is hot, O mother of stale delights,” he observed friendly. “How fares
it with thee inside there?”
“I stifle—I expire,” moaned Fatmeh.
“Take heart, O waning moon! The shade is at hand. Already I can see one
bûtm tree—a black head like mine above the hill. But shade is the parent
of flies, winged devils. Mules stung by them wax restless. Thy charms
will be sorely shaken.”
“O Lord, have mercy! Am I not dead already?”
Mâs grinned and brought his goad to bear upon the leading mule, which
had stopped in a vain endeavor to bite its flank.
They were engaged in climbing the brow of a ridge by a path embarrassed
with loose stones and occasional smooth rocks, treacherous to the hoofs.
Shems-ud-dìn led the way upon his old white horse, whose tail kept
swishing. He was followed by Zeyd, the son of Abbâs, a deplorable figure
surmounting the last of asses. At the crown of the ascent the sheykh drew
rein, allowing Zeyd to come up beside him.
“Praise to Allah!” he exclaimed, with hand shading his eyes.
Before them upon the sun-bleached slopes grew many trees, of dark foliage
which looked rusty as compared with its own rich shadow.
“Praise to Allah!” echoed Zeyd, and therewith groaned, for the hour of
parting was come.
At the foremost knot of trees a halt was made; the litter was set down,
and the beasts took their ease in battle with the flies. Fatmeh stepped
forth from her prison, strictly veiled, and sat down on the farther side
of the trunks from that where her lord reclined. Zeyd lay down before the
sheykh and ground his forehead in the mast from those trees. He wept:
“O dear lord! All my life shall I thank Allah for the memory of thee.
Hereafter, when thou art dead and thy remains are covered with a white
tomb, a wely where good men pause to pray, Zeyd will be thy pilgrim
yearly. Now, after an hour or two, if God will, I shall see again my own
house, my woman, and all belonging to me. By means of this ass, which the
owner would not receive again, I travel comfortably. My soul will rejoice
in the home-coming. Yet shall I never forget thee, O my guide. Till the
Last Day I am the better for thee. May Allah reward thee for thy mercy
toward me—thou high and learned, I the meanest in the land.”
“O kindest, O best, O most patient of all men living,” cried
Shems-ud-dìn, striving to raise him.
But Zeyd clove to the dust, praying:
“Bless me, O light from Allah, before I go. A long, a learned blessing, O
my master.”
Shems-ud-dìn blessed him then at great length. Knowing the weakness of
his poor disciple, he used to indulge it words of poetical and learned
use which, for Zeyd, fell straight from heaven.
“O my eyes! O too great glory! O my soul,” gasped the fellâh, moaning and
wriggling in the depth of enjoyment.
At the close of the benediction, Mâs, who stood beating off flies from
the horse of Shems-ud-dìn, cried:
“O Zeyd, thou art blest indeed. I behold that blessing upon thee, a robe
of purple embroidered with gold and jewelry. Henceforth thou art not like
the rest of us.”
Sobbing, speechless for beatitude, Zeyd struggled to his knees. He seized
the sheykh’s hand and, carrying it to his lips, rained passionate kisses
upon it. Then, starting up, he ran to his donkey, bestrode the same, and,
plying his stick, shambled off through the grove.
Shems-ud-dìn, as he watched Zeyd’s form recede, now blooming in a sun
ray, now fading in dense shadow, was not distressed. Time was when he
would have sorrowed thus to part with the kindest of creatures. But now
he saw men only as the sun sees them, while loving them for the love of
God who made them.
Attendant on the beasts, Mâs had wandered to a farther group of trees,
beneath which was some growth of herbage.
Over Shems-ud-dìn’s head the peep of sky through the branches made
separate sapphires set in ebonwork. His eyes uplifted in dreamy
contemplation, he did not see Fatmeh creeping toward him round the
ancient tree trunk. Only when she took his hand and pressed it to her
forehead did he wake to her presence with him.
“What ails thee, woman?” he asked in dismay.
“O hard of heart! O cruel!” she whimpered. “Art thou not lord of me?
Has my fancy ever strayed from thy goodliness to desire another’s? Now
Alia is dead, what am I? The women at the spring will mock me, saying,
‘O thing despised, alone in his house, yet unembraced.’ O my dear lord,
O tree of sweet fruit shading me, could I tell when I joined thy harìm,
to wait upon thy daughter, that by so doing I should render my widowhood
eternal? I knew thou hadst no other, save me and that very old one who is
since dead.... Let not the offense which I committed at that other tree
stand ever in thy sight against me. May Allah blast that other till the
Last Day. Died not my soul beneath its branches? But this is a good tree,
of shade most pleasant. Ah, put me not away, O lord of justice.”
Slowly the import of her blubbering reached Shems-ud-dìn’s intelligence;
and he saw plainly how, immersed in selfish grief, he had dealt harshly
by his servant. Her desires were natural and legitimate. She was now
alone in his house. He sought no other woman.
“So be it,” he said. “Very kind hast thou been to me through this time of
trouble. When the days of my grief are accomplished, if Allah spares us,
thou shalt have thy will.”
The creature’s gladness seemed excessive to one for whom all things were
now equal under heaven.
* * * * *
In the wide archway of his own house, overlooking the small white city
which had been his care so many years, the minaret which he had caused
to be built, and the yellow hills rolling to violet in the distance,
Shems-ud-dìn sat on a morning and wrote to his brother Milhem. Behind
him, in the shadow, knelt Mâs employed in trimming the lamps of the
house, shaking one after another to be sure it had oil enough. The sheykh
paused often before recharging his reed to gaze out over the sun-baked
land and smile, part ruefully.
“After inquiry touching thy illustrious health, I submit to thee, O my
dear brother, that my son Abd-ur-Rahman does, upon mature reflection,
elect to retire to a private station and has returned to this little
city, to the house of me his father; that he entreats thy pardon for a
defection which must bear the look of ingratitude; but that, in excuse,
he has not the strength of thee, O my brother, to escape corruption in a
path so full of temptations. Forget not, O my dear, how his childhood was
spent in a quiet place, among simple folk, far from all those seductions
which spring from too much luxury and the intercourse with foreigners and
men unsteadfast in the faith.
“Notwithstanding, I will not hide from thee my own lively pleasure in
this end to his deliberations, which appears to me the right one in the
sight of Allah.
“Furthermore, let me thank thee once again for thy gracious intervention
when Allah willed that I should be accused falsely in El Cûds, whither I
went last spring, on an evil prompting, to subject my beloved daughter,
then very ill, to the treatment of a Frank physician, in whose house she
died very peacefully, the praise to Allah. Though sad for the loss of my
daughter, and more for the inordinate affection my soul bore her, which
conscience tells was the cause of that loss, I am not unhappy. Thanks to
Allah! Here I am surrounded by friends who wish me well. A woman, long
a servant in my house and attendant on my little Alia, now tends to the
comfort of my age, and lavishes on me the endearments for which her sort
were created. Hassan Agha, our old acquaintance, was felled from his
horse and wounded recently in a conflict with certain of the Bedû who,
harboring a grudge against him for some wrong he did to them in El Cûds,
have harried us these three months past—against all precedent, for their
time of sojourn here is the winter—but now seem gone from the land, for
which we praise Allah. As for Hassan, thy bounteous grant of rifles and
powder has done much to reconcile him to my son, with whom he quarreled
in El Cûds. All my neighbors, alike Arab and Circassian, honored my son
with a great reception on his arrival yesterday in the morning.
“And now, O my brother, once more I beseech thee to forgive thy brother
and the son of thy brother, who are both very sensible of meriting thy
most just displeasure. And May Allah preserve thee always.”
This letter, when folded and sealed, was intrusted to the soldier servant
of Abd-ur-Rahman, who was obliged to set out that day on his return to El
Cûds.
In less than a month it was answered. A trooper from the garrison of
Esh-Shâm, calling God and his horse to witness that he had ridden day and
night without a halt, delivered the missive to Shems-ud-dìn as he sat in
the entry of his house toward sunset. With the usual courtesies, it ran:
“I have received thy honored letter, and though I grieve much for the
loss of a youth whom I had come to regard as my son (a thing I could
never procure of my own body, though I have tried many women and begotten
at divers times no less than sixteen daughters, if I count aright, so
that I have come to hate girl children as a deception, and utterly fail
to comprehend thy infatuation for that girl who died), yet I will not
disguise from thee that the withdrawal of the young one has done me good
in my position. It is but policy in the sovereign to look askance on the
posterity of men of note; and that custom of the Turks is wise by which
honors descend not from father to son. The eyes of many in high places
regarded with disfavor my fondness for Abd-ur-Rahman; but now, an old
man without a sequel, I arouse no hatred, only expectations. What am I,
thus lonely, but a kind of eunuch, a natural and unenviable appanage of
sovereignty.
“I rejoice to learn in what love and esteem thou art held by all who
know thee. As for me, I am beset with fears and hostile ambitions. Never
in my life have I inspired sincere affection, save only in thee, O my
brother. By Allah, the image of your little town rises tempting now in
my mind, though in the days I was condemned to sojourn there I deemed it
Jehennûm. It is because of our love, O my brother, for the sake of our
parting there at daybreak among the rocks, that the thought of it now
allures me. I am old and thou art old, but if it is the will of Allah
that I fall some day from use, as may well betide—should my life then be
spared and exile satisfy the lust of my enemies—I shall choose for place
of banishment thy little town beneath the hill of ruins, and count it
bliss to end my days at peace in the house of my brother.”
When Shems-ud-dìn looked up from the writing, he was blind with crowded
visions of a bygone day. Out of the evening calm he looked and saw the
vanity of man’s endeavor, from least to greatest, upon the earth, and how
it floats on God’s mercy as a boat on the mighty deep. And he cried from
his soul:
“Allah is greatest!”
THE END
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End of Project Gutenberg's The House of Islâm, by Marmaduke Pickthall