The Red Book Magazine/Volume 31/Number 4/The Magic of Mohammed Din

by Frederick Britten Austin

HERE some very German magic makes a Moslem of the Kaiser—but a more subtle wizardry makes a fool of him and his: a most unusual story by the author of “The Plateau of Thirst” and “The Prisoner of the Chateau.”

 

The MAGIC of
MOHAMMED DIN

By F. Britten Austin

Illustrated by
F. R. GRUGER

THE intense heat of the day was already a memory of uneasy sleep, and the distant hills seen across the plain of gray, sun-baked mud were soft in a soft sky. Right across the horizon, as seen from the Political Officer's bungalow, stretched the mountain range, rising from deep at the base through a gradation of fairy amethyst and turquoise to a delicate pink suffusing the summits. The Political Officer sat with his left elbow resting on his writing-table, his fingers caressing the bowl of an old brier, tobacco-smoke wreathing away from him. The gaze of that lean face, sallow with many Indian summers, roved not over the distant prospect, tempting though were the transitions and flaws of changing color on crag and peak to left and right of the point on which his vision was fixed. expression was stern, the thrust forward of his clean-cut jaw predominant. Esthetic enjoyment of the aspect of the frontier hills thus perfidiously beautiful in the evening light had no part in his meditations.

curtain of the door was plucked aside. A long-robed native, white-bearded, entered noiselessly, bowed by with arms outstretched from his sides, stood erect and waited for orders.

The Political Officer responded with a nod to the “Salam, Sahib!” His gaze detached itself from the distant view, ranged keenly over the tall figure in front of him. Under the swathes of the green puggaree that narrowed the brown forehead, a pair of dark eyes of strange intensity met his own. The disturbing effect of their direct gaze was heightened by the bushy white brows under which they glowed. The big, beaked nose, thin-bridged, emphasized their power. The long white beard spreading over the breast solemnified. them with a hint of ancient wisdom. The eyes of the white sahib and the ascetic haj (as his green turban proclaimed him) met unflinchingly.

“The Sahib asked for the fakir Mohammed Din—is it well, Sahib?”

“It is well, Haj,” replied the Political Officer, a twinkle in his eye and a subtle emphasis on the title.

“Did not the Prophet throw his green mantle over Ali that he might himself escape from his enemies, O Protector of the Religion?” replied the fakir, not a little piqued.

“Maloom” (“It is known”), said the Political Officer, curtly but with a tone of friendliness. “I called you not to discuss the religion, but to protect it. I have work for you, Mohammed Din—dangerous work.”'

“It is well, Sahib.”

“An emissary of our foes is among the tribes, Mohammed Din, and is preaching a false gospel to them. War and the woes of war will surely follow if we do not still his tongue. Listen. You have heard that the infidel Caliph Wilhelm of the West has falsely proclaimed himself a follower of the Prophet that he may use the power of true believers to further his own wicked ends?”

“It is known, Sahib.”

“He has sent one of his tribe, dressed as a fakir, into the hills to preach a new Jehad. Already the mullahs” (priests) “are gathering about him. This fakir calls himself Abd-ul-Islam, but he is a Feringhi, no true believer, and no true friend to the religion. Yet he is leading many astray, for he deludes them with a false magic. You remember the magic pictures you saw at Karachi?”

“I remember, Sahib.”

“It is such magic as that. There is none but Mohammed Din,” went on the Political Officer, “whom I might safely trust to close the mouth of such a rogue; therefore, Mohammed Din,”—the eyes of white sahib and Moslem fakir again looked into each other,—“I am sending you on the mission. I asked you to come as a fakir, because I judged that your best disguise. You have come as a haj, which is even better. I do not want this impostor killed if it can be helped. I want him exposed, discredited. I send you, Mohammed Din.” He. looked at the Moslem significantly as he added: “You may find an old acquaintance.”

The fakir stroked his long beard.

“He shall be brought to you riding backward upon an ass, and the women shall mock at him, Sahib. I swear it.”

The Political Officer smiled.

“None can if you cannot, Mohammed Din. Now I will explain these things to you more fully.”

The Political Officer spread a map across the table and pointed out the route of the German agent across the Persian frontier and among the hills. His present abiding-place was known fairly accurately. The pseudo-fakir attentively considered the ways to it. Then he drew himself erect.

“It is well, Sahib. I will now go.”

“You have a plan, Mohammed?”

The fakir smiled grimly.

“This dog has his false magic, Sahib, but Mohammed Din knows many magics that are not false. I have sworn.”

“Go, then. Allah be with you.”

“And with you, Sahib!”

THE World War has thus far produced only one really great new writer—Captain F. Britten Austin. He is only thirty years old; yet from the time he enlisted as a private—the day war was declared by England—until he was invalided home in 1917 he fought at Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Ypres and at the great battles of the Somme and the Ancre; and since his return to England he has been hard at work in the British War Office and has also written “Nach Verdun,” “In the Hindenburg Line,” “Zu Befehl,” “The Plateau of Thirst” and “The Prisoner of the Château.” Words about words are futile things: only you who have read any or all of these spirited battle-pieces know with what consummate clarity and brilliance he paints his war pictures, with what unsparing, force he drives home his dramas of high hazard and heroism.

Mohammed Din salamed once more, lifted the curtain and passed out. The Political Officer watched him go across the compound and the bent down to his work again with a little outbreathing of satisfaction. The secret service had no more reliable man than Mohammed Din.....

The squalid little village high up in a cleft of the brown and barren hills, that gleamed golden aloft where they cut sharply across the intense blue of the sky, was filled with an uncommon concourse of tribesmen. And yet more were arriving. Down the stony paths which led to the village from the heights, up the boulder-strewn, dried-up stream-bed which afforded the easiest passage from below, hillmen hurried in little groups—a bearded khan, a modern rifle on his shoulder, his cummerbund stuck full of knives followed by a ragged rabble of retainers, variously armed. Their weapons were mementos of generations of rifle-stealing and gun-running. Lee-Enfields, Lee-Metfords, Martinis, Sniders, all were represented. Not a few carried the old-fashioned jezail, the long-barreled gun with inlaid, curved stock. All had knives.

They swarmed on the rough roadway between the square windowless stone houses the loopholes of which were eloquent of their owners' outlook on life. They clustered round the stone-parapeted well in the center of the village, so that the women with the water-pots were richly provided with an excuse for loitering. The clamor of excited voices resounded from the walls, was reëchoed at a fiercer shout from the steep, towering hillsides stone-terraced near the village into plots of cultivated land.

This was no ordinary assemblage. From far and near the tribesmen swarmed in, and men met face to face whose habitual encounter would have sent both dodging to cover, rifle to the shoulder. Blood-feuds were laid aside. Families that for months had lived in terror of their neighbors across the village street—quitting their domiciles stealthily by the back way when they had occasion to go out, while the sudden rifle-shot of the concealed marksman added steadily to the tale of vendetta-victims on both sides—mingled now with the throng, albeit cautiously. Men whose dwellings were doorless towers which they entered and left by a basket on a rope, who tilled their fields with ever a rifle in their hand, strode now down the street, their dark eye roving from side to side, and passed their adversaries with scarce a scowl.

Mullahs, Koran in hand, their young disciples at their skirts, threaded their way through the crowd, giving and receiving pious salutation, exhorting, preaching, inflaming the fanaticism of passions naturally fierce. The blood-feuds between man and man, village and village, were forgotten in the reawakened, never-extinguished feud between Islam and the infidel. Behind the priests marched men armed to the teeth, their faces working in a frenzy, their eyes inflamed. They were ghazi wrought up to the pitch of fervor where their own lives were predetermined sacrifices, so that they may first slay unbelievers, sure of immediate paradise as their reward.

Above the murmur of voices came the continual drone:

“La Allah il Allah! There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet!”

It reëchoed down the valley in sudden shouts.

Illustration: Giving and receiving the Moslem greeting, “May the peace of Allah be with you!” he inquired the house of the village mullah and made his way toward it.

Into this excited throng strode the green turban, the venerable figure of Mohammed Din, piously telling his beads. Men jostled one another out of his way, for this fakir was quite obviously an especially holy man, one who had made the pilgrimage. Giving and receiving the Moslem greeting, “May the peace of Allah be with you!” he inquired the house of the village mullah and made his way toward it.

He met the priest just on the point of quitting his dwelling. The mullah had a busy and important look. It was a great day for him.

“The peace of Allah be with you!” said Mohammed Din.

“And with you, O holy man!” replied the mullah. He scented an application for hospitality. “Blessed is the day that you come to us, for Allah worketh wonders in my village. Many have come to witness them. Alas, that you did not come before, O holy one, or my house that I have already given up to others would be yours!”

“A corner and a crust of bread, O mullah!”

“Alas! Allah be my witness, neither remains to me, O holy one; but I will lodge you with a pious man when the saint whom Allah has sent to us has finished the wonders he is about to show. I must hurry, O holy one, for the moment is at hand. The peace of Allah be with you!”

“Allah has guided my footsteps to you, O mullah, for I have come from a far land to see these wonders. I will accompany you, for it is His will.”

“Hurry, then,” said the priest irritably, “or Shere Khan's house will be full.—Allah knoweth that I praise Him for thy coming!” he added by way of afterthought.

The house of Shere Khan, the headman of the village, was besieged by a turbulent crowd of tribesmen who jostled one another for entrance. In view of the limited space within, only those known to be most influential were admitted. They deposited their weapons as they entered.

Mohammed Din followed the mullah, who bustled in with an air of great importance. The largest room of Shere Khan's house, a gloomy stone-walled apartment almost completely dark, since the loopholes high up were stuffed with rags, was set aside for the occasion. More than two thirds of it was already filled with tribesmen who squatted on the floor. The remaining portion was rigidly kept clear by one or two of Shere Khan's armed retainers. “Sit farther back, O Yakub Khan! More space, O Protector of the Poor! Farther back, O Yusuf, lest the miracles about to be performed by the will of Allah scorch thee! Back, back, O children of the Prophet! I entreat ye!” The entreaty was emphasized by sundry kicks which the sentries grinningly delivered with a sense of the privileges proper to such an occasion.

The wall at the end of the clear space was whitened. High up on the other wall, behind the tribesmen, was a newly erected box of wood, large enough to hold a man, supported on pillars of light timber and only to be reached by a ladder of which there was at the moment no sign. The tribesmen turned their heads curiously toward this unusual contrivance and nudged and whispered to one another.

“Behold the cage in which the saint keeps the devils over which Allah and the Prophet have given him power!”

Those who were nearest it stirred uneasily.

“What if it should be the will of Allah that they break out of the cage?”

“We are God's, and unto God shall we return!” replied his neighbor nervously, quoting the verse of the Koran which gives protection in time of danger. “May Allah protect us!”

Mohammed Din sat modestly among the throng, telling his beads with bent head.

“What thinkest thou of these wonders, O holy one from a far land?” asked the man next him.

“The wisdom of Allah is inscrutable, and much that is hidden shall be yet revealed,” replied Mohammed Din.

There was a stir of expectation throughout the gloomy apartment. The mullah entered by a door at the farther end, near the whitened wall, uttered a sonorous benediction and sat down, with grave satisfaction, in the front row.

One minute more of tense waiting—and then, amid a low murmur from the assembly, the curtain at the far door was again lifted. The “saint” appeared. For a moment he stood in a dramatic pose, illumined by a ray of light from without as he held back the curtain. Then, dropping it, he strode solemnly forward into the cleared space. Every eye gazed at him with an avid curiosity. The light in the doorway had revealed him as a youngish man despite the full beard which lent him dignity. His stately carriage of the long Moslem robes, dimly perceived in the gloom, was worthy of his rôle.

He stretched out his hands.

“The peace of Allah be with you!” he said in a deep tone that had only the faintest tinge of a European accent.

In a low, deep chant of awed voices the assembly returned the salutation.

“O children of the Prophet, men of the hills, greeting! Greeting not from me, but from the greatest sultan of the world!” He spoke in their own dialect, but with a strong admixture of Persian words. “Listen! Ye know already—for his fame has passed the confines of the earth—that the great Sultan Wilhelm of the Franks was visited by a vision from God, and that having had truth revealed unto him, he turned aside from the error of his ways and embraced the true faith. Written in great letters of gold over the Sultan's palace shall ye find the sacred words; 'There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet!'”

He stopped to allow his words their full effect. A murmur of wonderment came from his audience. “A-a-h! God is great! Unto Him be the praise!”

Illustration: “There is none but Mohammed Din,” went on the Political Officer, “whom I might safely trust to close the mouth of such a rogue.”

He resumed.

“And with him turned all his viziers and mullahs and khans from the false belief and called on Allah and Mohammed. I—even I, Abd-ul-Islam, who stand before you—am one of them. The Sultan Wilhelm decreed that all his people believe the true faith. And lo! believing, they destroyed their false mosques and built new ones to the glory of the Prophet.

“For great is Allah and Mohammed His Prophet, that these things should have come to pass, O children of the faith! They are hard of belief, for the Franks, ye well know, are a stiff-necked race. Yet such it is, and my lord the Sultan “hath sent me on an embassy to you that I may tell you these marvelous things. And that ye may more readily believe, Allah in His great mercy has given me power to show you these wonders with your own eyes.” His tone took on a deeper, more sonorous solemnity. “O Allah! Allah! In the name of the Prophet, vouchsafe that these Thy children may see the great Sultan Wilhelm as he is at this moment!”

He clapped his hands sharply together.

A BEAM of intensely white light shot across the dark apartment from the “cage” and fell upon the white wall at the other end. The “saint” stepped quickly out of the radiance. On the white surface there suddenly appeared a life-size portrait of His Imperial Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II—gowned in long robes and coifed with a turban. A gasp of astonishment broke from the peering spectators in the dark room. Once more the “saint” clapped his hands. The Imperial figure walked in stately fashion straight toward the audience,—seeming that in another moment it would be walking out in the air over its heads,—stopped, stretched out its right hand, smiled. The muscles of its face moved; the mouth opened—in a speech that none heard. “Aie! Aie!” broke from the spellbound tribesmen.

“Alas, that he is so far away that ye cannot hear his words!” lamented the “saint.” “But I can hear them. He tells you to believe on me, who am his messenger, by the grace of Allah and the Prophet.—O Allah, vouchsafe that these Thy followers may witness with their own eyes the conversion of the viziers to the true faith!” Again a clap of the hands, and the picture on the wall changed.

The tribesmen gazed at what to a Western eye would have been an obviously cardboard imitation of an Oriental room with a dais on one side of it. On that dais stood the figure in Moslem robes. Filling the remainder of the room was a throng of men in German uniform, spiked helmets on their heads. They advanced one by one to the figure on the dais, knelt, offered up their spiked helmets and received in exchange turbans from their graciously smiling lord.

“See, O people, and believe!” cried the “saint.”

“Aie! Aie!” came the response. “We see and we believe! God is great! There is none but God, and unto Him be all the praise!”

“Listen, O true believers! The holy Prophet laid a command on the great Sultan Wilhelm that he should immediately convert all the Frankish nations to the true faith. And the Sultan Wilhelm gave glory to Allah that this command was laid upon him. He sent forth his armies in the great Jehad. The Sultan's armies are the most numerous and bravest in the whole world—not Timur nor Rustum might have stood against them; and none may count the number of their victories in the great war against the infidel Franks. Their triumphs are as the rocks on the hillsides, beyond reckoning and eternal. All the nations of the Franks fled before them and were slain like dog as they ran. And most of all fled before them and were slain the insolent English dogs that thinking themselves far away from the power of the Sultan Wilhelm are puffed up with a vain pride and tread upon the neck of the true believer in the land beyond the Indus—nay, who if your hills and lay waste your crops, seeking to destroy the one true faith. Is it not so?”

“Allah knoweth! He speaketh through thy lips, O holy one!” was the chorused reply from the darkened room. There could be no denial of any statement from a source of such sanctity.

“Look, then, upon the battle and the destruction of the English dogs!” cried Abd-ul-Islam, giving the signal once more.

Immediately another picture appeared upon the wall—a picture of pseudo-British troops, uniformed so as to be familiar to the tribesmen, taking up a position for battle.

“Watch! O children of the Prophet!” cried the wonder-worker. “Behold the jinn which the Sultan Wilhelm has under his command, for to him has the prophet given the power of Solomon—behold the jinn that go before the Sultan's army destroying the English infidels!”

Great founts of black smoke leaped up among the soldiers on the wall; débris was flung high into the air; bodies lay on the ground, visible where the smoke cleared. The soldiers fired quickly from behind cover, dodged, flung up their arms and fell smitten by an invisible foe.

“Behold!” cried the showman. “The soldiers of the Sultan advance!” A serried line of German infantry swept across the picture, bayonets leveled, and the survivors of the defending troops fled before them. The line changed direction and marched straight toward the spectators, an irresistibly advancing menace, swelling larger and larger, uncannily silent.

SHRILL cries of alarm broke out from the darkened room. “Aie! Aie! Allah protect us! We are God's, and unto God shall we return!”

The line of infantry swelled to a superhuman immensity, seemed on the point of reaching the spectators—and then there was darkness.

From the gloom came the voice of the German emissary.

“You have beheld, O children of the true faith! The infidel English ran like dogs! Now see the soldiers of the Prophet, the victorious army of the Sultan, destroying the Christian mosques in the conquered country!” announced the showman in a voice of triumph.

Picture after picture of ruined and desolated churches followed upon the wall. The German authorities had evidently prepared a special film of them. Cries of wild approbation broke from the fanatical tribesmen, the mullahs loudest.

“Once more, O people, look upon the English prisoners, whose lives have been spared because they have embraced the true faith, being led through the Sultan's capital!”

A film of a few British prisoners from Gallipoli being marched through the streets of Constantinople was then shown, amid shouts of applause.

The picture was taken off, but the beam of light still blazed across the room. German placed himself full in it.

“Ye have seen with your own eyes, O warriors of the hills, praise be to Allah for His mercies! Ye will no longer doubt. In the name of the Prophet, the Sultan Wilhelm, the protector of Islam, commands that ye rise up and sweep beyond the Indus. Everywhere the power of the English is broken. With your own eyes ye have seen it. Only on your borders do they still keep up a vain show. Rise up, O children of the Prophet, and sweep these dogs of infidels into the sea! The rich lands of India and much loot will be the reward of your valor. Paradise awaits those who fall in the sacred fight! The green banner of Islam shall wave over the entire earth, for there is no God but God; Mohammed is His Prophet; and the Sultan Wilhelm is His chosen instrument!”

Karl Schultz felt an inward glow of triumph at his own histrionic power as, his words ringing sonorously through the stone apartment, he stood in the full blaze of light and raised his arm. It evoked loud shouts of fanatic frenzy from the excited assembly. They clamored to be led against the infidel there and then. He kept his arm outstretched as though to still the tumult, as though his discourse were yet unfinished.

But the cries would not cease. “Great is Allah! Death to the infidel! Death! Allah! Allah! There is no God but God! Allah! Allah!! Allah!!! Death to the infidel—death!”

SUDDENLY there was a new element in the vociferation, a movement among the assembly far back in the dark room. “Make way for the holy man with great tidings from India! Make way for the haj! In the name of the Prophet—make way, dogs that ye are!”

Schultz looked toward the venerable figure of Mohammed Din pressing through the throng. A sudden doubt leaped up in him, was extinguished in self-confidence. The strange fakir approached. The wild clamor of the tribesmen was stilled. They fell back in sudden awe.

Schultz watched the venerable stranger advance solemnly, silently, into the blaze of light in which he himself stood. Again he was conscious of an instinctive tremor. “The peace of Allah be with thee, O Haj!” he said, and he found that he had deliberately to control his own voice. There was something uncannily impressive in the advance of this silent, dignified old man.

“And with all the faithful!” came the sonorous, enigmatic reply.

He found himself looking into a pair of strangely disturbing eyes, heard, with a wild, reeling shock of the spirit, his own tongue spoken in a low, level Oriental voice.

“Move not a finger and make not a sound, Schultz Sahib, or you are a dead man!” Schultz Sahib's eyes glimpsed the muzzle of a pistol not six inches from his chest. “Smile, Sahib, or your friends may interrupt us.”

Having once ceded to the menace of the pistol, the German's brain could not resist the command of the imperative eyes that seemed to be boring deep into him. He smiled—a deathly smile.

“You have forgotten me, Schultz Sahib? It is not so long since we worked together on the railway. One of us at least learned a great deal about the other in those days, Sahib..... Smile—keep smiling!”

A wild revolt surged up in the German, subsided, without exterior evidence, under the glare of the dominating eyes which held his fascinated. He tried to turn away his gaze, was checked by the level, purposeful voice of the fakir.

“Keep your eyes on mine, Sahib! Look elsewhere, and you are dead before you have looked!”

He heard the words reverberating through him, endlessly reëchoing in chambers of his soul magicly open to them. He felt himself fixed, immobile, in a strange paralysis of the faculties. The terrible eyes looked into his that he could not close—he felt waves of an immeasurable strange force flowing from them, rolling over him, submerging him. And still he looked into the eyes of the fakir.

A subtle, pervading odor ascended his nostrils, filled his lungs, mounted to his head. His brain grew dizzy with it. And still the compelling eyes held him, prevented him from turning his own eyes to the source of the odor. He lost the sense of his environment, was oblivious to the awed tribesmen staring silently at the pair in the blaze of light. He saw nothing but the eyes—lost consciousness of his own body. He stared—and lost consciousness even of the eyes at which he stared.

THERE came upon Karl Schultz vacuity, oblivion, an annihilation of time—and then out of that vacuity a voice began to speak. An awful, unimaginable disaster seemed to envelop him.

And still the voice went on relentlessly, driving through darkness, like a plowshare thrust forward by the firm grip of a mighty and inexorable hand. Immeasurable results seemed dependent on his progress. He listened to it; and as he focused himself on the listening, a dim perception of his environment came to him. He was vaguely conscious of a sea of faces, upturned, listening—as he himself listened..... He listened. The words rang like sounding brass, the vowels roaringly sonorous, the consonants clashing. He concentrated himself as their meaning—penetrated to it suddenly as through veils smitten asunder.

“Lies and again lies, O children of the Prophet! A mockery of lies! The Sultan Wilhelm is a servant of Shaïtàn who feigneth religion that he may lure the believers to their damnation while they unwittingly serve the Evil One!”

Karl Schultz's perception leaped up, clawing at danger, and then was dragged down again, engulfed. He felt himself like a man drowning in black waters of night—down—down; and then, fighting obscurely, he shot up again, heard the inexorable voice continuing:

“This magic you have looked upon is false magic—the magic of unbelievers in league with Eblìs!”

He heard the reëchoing denunciations in a spasm of full consciousness—was suddenly cognizant of the sea of faces, of fierce passions exhaling from it—was completely aware of the menace of utter ruin. A great revulsion surged in him. This must be stopped—stopped! The necessity for instant protest was an anguish in him. All of himself that he could summon from the darkness as his own shrieked the negative, and yet he'd not utter a sound—knew that he did not.

“Climb up into that box, some of you and ye shall: find no magic but a Frank there!”

He strained with all his soul toward the faculty of speech—felt his powers vanquishing the spell of dumbness—on the verge of utterance shaped his words of denial. “Lo! have I not spoken the truth? Yea, I cannot speak other than the truth, for I am the runaway servant of Mohammed Din, and his sanctity hath broken the compact between me and the Evil One!”

In staggering horror Schultz realized—the voice was his own!

HE stood, fixed, incapable of movement, and saw—like a man that has dreamed and cannot yet distinguish dream from reality—the mob of tribesmen surging obscurely in the long stone room, with the blinding white eye of the lantern still steadfastly upon him—saw it waver, swing from side to side and then, with one last blinding flash, disappear. In the utter darkness he heard shouts and shrieks and fierce derisive laughter. He heard crash upon crash as heavy objects were flung from a height at the other end of the room. He heard a piercing yell, an agonized appealing utterance of his own name. For a brief second it shocked him into complete consciousness—his operator! Then, ere he could break his invisible bonds, he felt a pair of cool hands pressed tightly against his brow, over his eyes, and he relapsed into nothingness.

He awoke again to see the tribesmen surging round him, fiercely shouting. The room reëchoed with reiterated cries of “Sharm! Sharm!” ^[1] and a howl that was so unmistakably for blood that it chilled him to the heart. The room was lighter now—the rags had been pulled down from the high loopholes in the wall. He saw Mohammed Din standing before him, fending off his adversaries. He was still incapable of voluntary movement. Dazed and sick, he heard Mohammed Din speaking.

“O children of the hills, Allah and His Holy Prophet sent me to you to rescue you from the snare of the Evil One. On me is laid the charge of vengeance upon this wretch who was my slave ere he became the possessed of Shaìtàn. But this much of vengeance will I grant ye, for this much is just. He made a mock of you. Make ye a mock of him. Let him be driven out of the village, face tailward upon an ass. The women and children shall cry derision upon the runaway servant who came to deceive you as a saint with the false magic of Shaìtàn!”

Staring speechlessly before him, the exposed charlatan heard the howls of approval of the mob. His faintly working intellect wondered how the mullah was taking this deception. He saw Mohammed Din hold up a large bag of money. He recognized it with a last hopelessness.

“This gold,”—Mohammed Din emptied some of it upon his hand—“this gold hath my servant surely received from Shaìtàn. It is accursed unless some holy man receive it. Therefore to you, O mullah, do I give it.”

The mullah snatched at it.

“Great is Allah, and for the meanest of His creatures doth He provide!” he said. “Thou speakest truth, O holy fakir. Praise be to Allah that I am here to protect the faithful from the accursed magic of this gold. As to this wretch, accursed of Allah, let him be driven quickly forth as thou sayest, O holy one.”

There was a rush at the fallen magician. He swooned into their arms.

SOME little time later, when the last stone had been flung and the last epithet of mocking insult had ceased to echo from the hills, Schultz Sahib, his hands bound behind his back, his feet tied under the belly of his mount, raised his eyes from the donkey's tail.

“Thou hast won, O Mohammed Din—but even yet I do not understand. What happened?”

The fakir smiled.

“Thou hast thy magic, Schultz Sahib—what thinkest thou of Mohammed Din? Hurry, O Wilhelm, hurry!” he cried as his stick descended with a resounding thwack upon the hindquarters of the beast. “Thou art laggard in thy invasion of the territories of the English!”

(The Political Officer listened to the story, and embracing hypnotism in the studies of his exile, made a note of it.)

1. Sharm: a stain of dishonor that can only be obliterated in blood—the conception that underlies the blood-feud.