BY THE SAME AUTHOR
- FICTION
- THE GATES
- JOHN STUART
- VERSE
- SONGS AND SATIRES
- THEATRE
- LES PARIAHS
- THE CAP AND BELLS
- PEOPLE LIKE OURSELVES
- CLASS
- THEATRE IN VERSE
- FOOLERY
- DUSK
THE SINGING CARAVAN
RECENT POETRY
| THE HEART OF PEACE | |
| By Laurence Housman. | 5s. net |
| ESCAPE AND FANTASY | |
| By George Rostrevor. | 3s. 6d. net |
| THE SAILING SHIPS | |
| By Enid Bagnold. | 5s. net |
| COUNTER-ATTACK | |
| By Siegfried Sassoon. | 2s. 6d. net |
| POEMS | |
| By Geoffrey Dearmer. | 2s. 6d. net |
THE SINGING CARAVAN
A SUFI TALE
BY
ROBERT VANSITTART
Each man is many as a caravan;
His straggling selves collect in tales like these.
Only the love of one can make him one.
Who takes the Sufi Way—the Way of Peace?
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1919
Printed in Great Britain
IN MEMORIAM
MY BROTHER ARNOLD
2nd Lieutenant, 11th Hussars
KILLED IN ACTION NEAR YPRES
MAY 1915
In twenty years of lands and seas and cities
I had small joy and sought for it the more,
Thinking: "If ever I am πολύμητις,
'Tis yours to draw upon the hard-won store."
I had some bouts from Samarkand to Paris,
And took some falls 'twixt Sweden and Sudan.
If I was slow and patient learning parries,
I hoped to teach you when you were a man.
I cannot fall to whining round the threshold
Where Death awaited you. I lack the skill
Of hands for ever working out a fresh hold
On life. In mystic ways I serve you still.
The age of miracles is not yet ended.
As on the humble feast of Galilee
Surely a touch of heaven has descended
On the cheap earthen vessel, even on me,
Whose weak content—the soul I travail under—
Unstable as water, to myself untrue,
God's mercy makes an everlasting wonder,
Stronger than life or death, my love of you.
I am indebted to Mr. Arthur Humphreys, Mr. John Murray, and the Editor of the Spectator for kind permission to reproduce a few of the shorter poems in this tale of Persian mystics. I have included them, firstly, because I wished otherwise new work, being a memorial, to include such fragments of the past as might be worth preserving; secondly, because decreasing leisure inspires a diffidence in the future that may justify me in asking a reader or a friend to judge or remember me only by "Foolery" and "The Singing Caravan."
R. V.
[CONTENTS]
PRELUDE
The sun smote Elburz like a gong.
Slow down the mountain's molten face
Zigzagged the caravan of song.
Time was its slave and went its pace.
It bore a white Transcaspian Queen
Whose barque had touched at Enzelí.
Splendid in jewelled palanquin
She cleft Iran from sea to sea,
Bound for the Persian Gulf of Pearls,
Where demons sail for drifting isles
With bodyguards of dancing girls
And four tamed winds for music, smiles
For passports. Thus the caravan,
Singing from chief to charvadar,
Reached the great gate of screened Tehran.
The burrows of the dim bazaar
Swarmed thick to see the vision pass
On broidered camels like a fleet
Of swaying silence. One there was
Who joined the strangers in the street.
They called him Dreamer-of-the-Age,
The least of Allah's Muslimeen
Who knew the joys of pilgrimage
And wore the sign of sacred green,
A poet, poor and wistful-eyed.
Him all the beauty and the song
Drew by swift magic to her side,
And in a trance he went along
Past friends who questioned of his goal:
"The Brazen Cliffs? The Realms of Musk?
Goes he to Mecca for his soul?..."
The town-light dwindled in the dusk
Behind. Ahead Misr? El Katíf?
The moon far up a brine-green sky
Made Demavend a huge pale reef
Set in an ocean long gone dry.
Bleached mosques like dwarf cave-stalagmites,
Smooth silver-bouldered biyaban
And sevenfold velvet of white nights
Vied with the singing caravan
To make her pathway plain.
Then one
Beside the poet murmured low:
"I plod behind, sun after sun,
O master, whither do we go?
"Are we for some palmed port of Fars,
Or tombed Kerbela, or Baghdad
The Town-of-Knowledge-of-the-Stars?
Is worship wise or are we mad?"
Answered the poet: "Do we ask
Allah to buy each Friday's throng?
None to whom worship is a task
Should join the caravan of song.
"With heart and eyes unquestioning, friend,
We follow love from sea to sea,
And Love and Prayer have common end:
'May God be merciful to me!'"
So fared they, camped from noon to even,
Till dawn, quick-groping through the gloom,
Pounced on gilt planets low in heaven.
Thus they beheld the domes of Kum.
And onward nightly. Though the dust
Swirled in dread shapes of desert Jinn,
Ever the footsore poet's trust
Soared to the jewelled palanquin,
Parched, but still singing: "God, being great,
Lent me a star from sea to sea,
The drop in his hand-hollow, Fate.
He holds it high, and signs to me
"Although She—She may not ..."
"For thirst
My songs and dreams like mirage fail.
Yea, mad "—his fellow pilgrim cursed—
"I was. The Queen lifts not her veil."
"Put no conditions to her glance,
O happy desert, where the guide
Is Love's own self, Life's only chance ..."
He saw not where the other died,
But pressed on strongly, loth to halt
At Persia's pride, Rose-Ispahan,
Whose hawks are bathed in pure cobalt.
To meet the singing caravan
Came henna-bearded prince and sage
With henna-fingered houris, who
Strove to retard the pilgrimage,
Saying: "Our streets are fair and you
"A poet. Sing of us instead.
God may be good, but life is short.
Yon are the mountains of the dead.
Here are clean robes to wear at court."
He said: "I seek a bliss beyond
The range of your muezzin-call.
Do birds cease song till heaven respond?
The road is naught. The Hope is all."
"You know not this Transcaspian Queen,
Or what the journey's end may be.
Fool among Allah's Muslimeen,
You chase a myth from sea to sea."
"Because I bargain not nor guess
If Waste or Garden wait for me,
Love gives me inner loveliness.
I hold to her from sea to sea."
So he was gone, nor seemed to care
For beckoning shade, or boasting brook,
Or human alabaster-ware
Flaunted before him in the suk,
Nor paused at sunburnt far Shiraz,
The home of sinful yellow wine,
Where morning mists, like violet gauze,
Deck the bare hills, and blossoms twine
In seething coloured foam around
The lighthouse minarets.
And sheer—
A thin cascade bereft of sound—
The track falls down to dank Bushír.
The caravan slipped to the plain.
Its song rose through the rising damp,
Till, through the grey stockade of rain,
The Gulf of Pearls shone like a lamp.
Here waiting rode a giant dhow,
Each hand a captive Roumi lord,
Who rose despite his chains to bow
As straight her beauty went aboard,
Sailed. For the Tableland of Rhyme?
The Crystal Archipelago?
Who knows! This happened on a time
Among the times of long ago.
He only, Dreamer-of-the-Age,
Was left alone upon the sands,
The goal of his long pilgrimage,
The soil of all the promised lands,
Watching the dhow cut like a sword
The leaden waves. Yet, ere she sailed,
God poured on broken eyes reward
Out of Heaven's heart.
The Queen unveiled.
There for a space fulfilment shone,
While worship had his soul for priest
And altar. Then the light was gone,
And on the sea the singing ceased.
And is this all my story? Yes,
Save that the Sufi's dream is true.
Dearest, in its deep lowliness
This tale is told of me and you.
O love of mine, while I have breath,
Whatever my last fate shall be,
I seek you, you alone, till death
With all my life—from sea to sea.
And God be merciful to me.
I
THE VIEW OF THE WATCHMEN
The pilgrims from the north
Beat on the southern gate
All eager to set forth,
In little mood to wait
While watchman Abdelal
Expounded the Koran
To that wise seneschal,
His mate, Ghaffír Sultan.
At length Ghaffír: "Enough!"
Even watchmen's heads may nod.
"Asräil is not rough
If we have faith in God."
His fellow tapped the book:
The Darawish discuss
The point you overlook:
Has Allah faith in us?
Know, then, that Allah, fresh
And splendid as a boy
Who thinks no ill of flesh,
Had one desire: a toy.
And so he took for site
To build his perfect plan
The Earth, where His delight
Was manufactured: Man.
Ah, had we ever seen
The draft, our Maker's spit,
I think we must have been
Drawn to live up to it.
God was so pure and kind
He showed Shaitan the lease
Of earth that He had signed
For us, His masterpiece.
The pilgrims cried: "You flout
Our calm. Beware. It flags.
Unbar and let us out,
Sons of a thousand rags."
And Abdelal said: "Hark!
Methought I heard a din."
Said Ghaffír: "After dark
I let no devils in.
"Proceed." He sucked his pipe:
God in His happiest mood
Laid down our prototype,
And saw that man was good.
Aglow with generous pride:
"Shaitan the son of Jann,
This is my crown," He cried.
"Bow down and worship man."
Said Evil with a smirk—
He was too sly to hiss—
"I cannot praise your work.
I could have bettered this."
God said: "I could have sown
The soil my puppet delves,
Yet rather gave my own
Power to perfect themselves."
Still the fiend stiffened. "I
Bow not." Our prophet saith
That he would not comply
Because he had no faith
In us. He only saw
The worst of Allah's toy,
The springs, some surface flaw,
The strengthening alloy.
Said God: "The faults are mine.
I gave him hope and doubt,
The mind that my design
Shall have to work Me out.
What though he fall! Is love
So faint that I should grieve?
How else, friend, should I prove
To him that I believe?
"And how else should he rise?
Lo, I, that made the night,
Have given his conscience eyes
Therein to find the Right.
I have stretched out his hand,
Oh, not to grasp but feel,
Have taught his aims to land,
But tipped the aims with steel;
"Have given him iron resolve
And one great master-key,
Courage, to bid revolve
The hinge of destiny,
And beams from heaven to build
The road to Otherwise,
With broken gloom to gild
The causeway of his sighs
"Whereby I watch him come
At last to judge of Me,
Beyond the thunder's drum,
The cymbals of the sea.
Aye, Shaitan, plumb the Space
And Time that planets buoy,
And you shall know the place
Appointed for my toy.
"I could not give him rest,
And see him satiate
At once, or make the zest
Of life an opiate.
I might have been his lord,
I had not been his friend
To sheathe his spirit's sword
And start him at the end.
"I would not make him old,
That he might see his port
Fling its nocturne of gold
And cheerfulness athwart
The dusk. I planned the wave,
And wealth of wind and star.
Could one be gay and brave
Who never saw afar
"The cause that he outlives
Only because he fought,
The peaks to which he strives,
The ranges of his thought,
Until the dawn to be
Relieve his watchfires dim,
Not by his faith in Me
But by my faith in him!
"I also have my dreams,
And through my darkest cloud
His climbing phalanx gleams
To my salute, and, proud
Of him even in defeat,
My light upon his brow,
My roughness at his feet,
I triumph. Shaitan, bow!"
But Shaitan like an ass
Jibbed and would not give ear.
Just so it came to pass,
Declares our Book, Ghaffír.
We know that in the heat
Of disputation—well,
Allah shot out his feet,
And Shaitan went to hell.
Thus Abdelal. The gate
Shook to the pilgrims' cry:
"When will you cease to prate,
Beards of calamity!"
The poet: "Allah's bliss
Fall on his watchmen! Thus
Our journey's password is
That God has faith in us."
II
THE JOY OF THE WORDS
The Sufis trembled: "Open, open wide,
Dismiss us to illuminate the East."
Old Ghaffír fumbled the reluctant bolts,
Lifting his hands and eyes as for a feast.
And this was their viaticum. His words
Were mingled with their eagerness like yeast:
Go forth, poor words!
If truly you are free,
Simple, direct, you shall be winged like birds,
Voiced like the sea.
Walk humbly clad!
Be sure those words are lame
That ride a-clatter, or that deck and pad
A puny frame.
As in your dress,
So in your speech be plain!
Be not deceived; the Mighty Meaningless
Are loud in vain.
Be not puffed up,
Nor drunk with your own sound!
Shall men drink deeply when an empty cup
Is handed round?
Shout not at heaven!
Say what I bade you say.
Simplicity is beauty dwelling even
In yea or nay.
Be this your goal.
Beauty within man's reach
Is poetry. You cannot touch man's soul
Save with man's speech.
Therefore go straight.
You shall not turn aside
To vain display; for yonder lies the gate
Where gods abide
Your coming. Go!
The way was never hard.
What would you more than common flowers or snow?
For your reward,
Be understood,
And thus shall you be sung.
Aye, you who think to show us any good,
Speak in our tongue.
III
THE DEPTH OF THE NIGHT
The watchman finished, as the southern gate
Clanged, and the breathless city lay behind.
The Dreamer's shadows shrank against the wall,
As though the desert called and none replied,
Till the young pilot, standing out to night,
Swung clear these lines to sound the depths of her:
"Blue Persian night,
Soft, voiceless as the summer sea!
Flooding the bouldered desert sand, submerge
This cypressed isle
And Demavend's snow-spire—a sunken rock
On your hushed floor, where I the diver stand
Beyond the reach of day.
And though, up through your overwhelming peace,
I see your surface, heaven,
I would not rise there, being drowned in you,
Blue Persian night.
"Blue Persian night,
O consolation of the East!
In your clear breathless oceanic sheen
My heart's an isle,
From whose innumerable caves and coigns—
When dusk awakes the city of my mind—
Exploring boats set forth,
Bound for the harbour-lights of God knows where,
Full, full of God knows what;
It must be love of Him, or Her, or You,
Blue Persian night."
Her signal answered; for a slender wand
Of moonbeam touched the Dreamer on the mouth.
The caravan looked upward with a shout
And set its camels rolling to the south,
Murmuring: "Blue Persian night, none ever saw
You through your own sheer purity before us.
Rise up our songs as bubbles from the sand ..."
Somewhere among the camels rose this chorus:
Dong! Dong!
Lurching along
Out of the dusk
Into the night.
Noiseless and lusty,
Dreamy and dusty,
Looms the long caravan-line into sight.
Dong! Dong!
Never a song,
Never a footfall
A breath or a sigh.
Ghostly and stolid,
Stately and squalid,
Creeps the monotonous caravan by.
Dong! Dong!
Fugitive throng.
Out of the dark
Into the night,
Silent and lonely,
Gone!... the bells only
Tells us a caravan once was in sight.
IV
THE INWARDNESS OF THE MERCHANT
Moussa, the son of the Crypto-Jew,
Had eaten his fill of yellow stew
And a bit besides (as a business man
He was far too quick for the caravan,
Who loved him not, though it feared his guile).
Moussa then: "I shall walk awhile
"To ease my soul of its heavy load."
His pious friends: "May you find a road,"
And winked. "His soul has begun to feel
There's nothing left but a march to steal."
But one from the village, decoying quail
For the governor's pot, came back with a tale
Of a lean arm shaken against the sky
Like a stunted thorn, and this piteous cry:
"As sound within an ice-bound desert mewed
Drags out existence at the very core
Of isolation, as breakers slip ashore
In vainly eternal whispers to the nude
Reef-coral, where no human feet intrude
Upon the purity of stillness; or
As, far from life, unmated eagles soar
Above the hilltops' breathless solitude,
"So moves my love, like these a thing apart,
Fierce, in the ruined temple of my heart,
Shy as a shooting star that peers new-risen
Mid strangers. Even so. Pent in the prison
Of space my soul, a lonely planet, wheels ...
Men call the sum of loneliness 'Ideals.'"
This is the plaint that the cross-road heard
Where it strikes from Kashan to Burujird.
The townsmen, met by the sun-dried stream,
Caught a voice high up like an angel's scream
Or a teaspoon tapping the bowl of heaven,
And they cried: "Ajab! May we be forgiven,
"But it sounds a soul of the rarer sort
Whose wings are set for no earthly port."
And the answer came, as they cried: "Who's that?"
"One that sells short weight in mutton fat."
V
THE LESSON OF THE CAMEL
Light was not. All was still. The caravan
Had ceased its song and motion by the bed
Wherein the hill-stream tosses sleeplessly,
The only sound, save one staccato note
Interminably piped by tiny owls.
The camp lay balmed in slumber, as the dead
Are straitened in white trappings. Then a voice,
Deeper than any dead black mountain pool
Or blacker well where devils cool by day,
Seemed to commune with Dreamer-of-the-Age,
Who, peering through the cloak about his head,
Challenged: "Who speaks?" The voice replied: "A friend
Unknown to you." ... It was old Peacock Tous,
The great grey camel with the crimson tail
On whom the queen was wont to ride. He said:
"Sheikh, I was born among the Bakhtiari,
The shelter of their hawthorn vales was mine;
For me, unbroken to the loads men carry,
The breeze that crowns their uplands glowed as wine
To drink. I, Tous, the Peacock, whom men call so
Because I ever moved as one above
The common herd, was mad and merry. Also
I knew not yet the prickled herb of Love.
"Spring tricked the desert out with flowered patterns
For me to tread like flowered carpets wrought
In patience by my master's painted slatterns—
He said that only Persian women fought.
Ah, youth is free and silken-haired and leggy!
No camel knows why Allah makes it end,
But He is wiser. Me the tribe's Il-Beggi
Spied out and sent as tribute to a friend,
"A dweller in black tents, a nomad chieftain
Of Khamseh Arabs or unruled Kashgai,
Whose cattle-raids and rapines past belief stain
The furthest page of camel-history.
And shamefully the ragged sutlers thwacked us,
Until I learned, as to this manner born,
That pride must find a mother in the cactus
And hope the milk of kindness in the thorn.
"O Sheikh, I found. A milk-white nakeh followed
The drove of males, and I would lag behind
With her, no matter how the drivers holloa'ed—
Man never doubts that all but he are blind.
At nightfall, when our champing echoed surly
Beyond the cheerful circle of the fire,
Something within me whispered, and thus early
I bore the burden of the world's desire.
"But I was saddled with the will of Allah,
Since one there was more fleet of foot than I,
The chosen of the chief of the Mehallah,
Whose nostrils quivered as he passed me by.
To her, beside his paces and his frothing,
My steadfastness was common as the air,
My passion and my patience were as nothing,
Because fate chose to make my rival fair.
"I suffered and was silent—some said lazy—
Until the seasons drove us to the plain.
The nomads sold me then to a Shirazi.
I never met my happiness again,
But trod the same old measure back and forward,
And passed a friend as seldom as a tree.
Oh, heaviness of ever going shoreward,
Of bringing all fruition to the sea!
"For I have fared from sea to sea like you, sirs,
And with your like, not once but many times.
Your path acclaims me eldest of its users,
It tells my step as I foresee your rhymes.
I know by heart a heartache's thousandth chapter
As you have read the preface of delight.
The silence you shall enter, I have mapped her.
O singing caravan, I was To-night
"Long ere you dreamed. I dreaming of my lady
Became the cargo-bearer we call Self.
Two hundredweight of flesh that spouted Sa'di,
A restless bag of bones intent on pelf,
Have straddled me in turn.... Hashish and spices,
Wheat, poisons, satins, brass, and graven stone,
I, Tous, have borne all human needs and vices
As solemnly as had they been my own.
"Moon-faced sultanas blue with kohl a-pillion,
Grey ambergris, pink damask-roses' oil,
Deep murex purple, beards or lips vermilion
As Abu Musa's flaming scarlet soil
I have borne—and dung and lacquer. I have flooded
Bazaars with poppy-seed and filigree.
Men little guess the stuff that I have studied,
Or what their vaunted traffic seems to me.
"I am hardened to all wonderments and stories—
My ears have borne the hardest of my task—
I have carried pearls from Lingah up to Tauris,
And Russian Jews from Lenkoran to Jask.
I have watched fat vessels crammed by sweating coolies
With all the rubbish that the rich devise,
And often I have wondered who the fool is
That takes it all, and whom the fool supplies.
"Yet ran my thoughts on her, though cedar rafters
Were laid on me, or mottled silk and plush,
Although the tinkling scales of varied laughters
Rode me from Bandar Abbas to Barfrush,
Or broken hearts from Astara to Gwetter.
All ironies have made their moving house
Of me. I smile to think how many a letter
Has passed from loved to lover thanks to Tous
"The loveless. Think you men alone are lonely,
My masters? I have also worshipped one,
Have built my days of faith and service only,
And while I worshipped all my life was gone.
I spent the funds of life in growing older,
In heaping fuel on a smothered fire.
See how my tale is rounded! On my shoulder
I bear the burden of your world's desire.
"Yet keep that inner smile; and never show it
Though the Account be nothing—shorn of her.
Be wise, O Sheikh. Pray God to be a poet
Lest life should make you a philosopher,
Or lest the dreams of which you had the making
Should prove to be such stuff as still I trail,
And bring your heart, my withers, nigh to breaking
When at the last the Bearer eyes the Bale,
"As you shall penetrate this day or morrow
The miracle of willing servitude,
And yet believe therein. It is the sorrow
And not the love that asks to be subdued;
It is the mirage not the truth that trammels
The travelling feet. Ah, if men only knew
How their brief frenzies move the mirth of camels,
Our rests were longer and our journeys few.
"Old Tous is up. The camp is struck and ready
For fresh emprise. Dawn sifts the clay-blue sky
For gold. Now see how dominant and steady
I prose along that have no mind to fly.
This is my lesson: over sand or shingle,
Blow hot, blow cold, by mountain, plain and khor,
Coming and going, I must set a-jingle
My own deep bell.... And you must ask for more!"
He ceased. White on the mirror of the air
His breath made patterns. In a ruined farm
Red cocks blared out and shouted down the owls.
The drivers rubbed their eyes. Another day
Among the days was starting on its march....
Above the pilgrims fallen to their prayers
Old Tous stood upright, blinking at the sun.
VI
THE BOASTING OF YOUTH
The soldier-lad from Kerman,
The sailor-lad from Jask
Knew naught that should deter man
From finishing the cask.
"Wine sets the Faithful jibbing
Like mules before an inn,
But we sit bravely bibbing,
And hold our own with sin."
Said the stout-hearted wonder
Of Jask: "Wine frights not me.
I fear no foe but thunder
And winds that sting the sea."
"And I," said he of Kerman,
"Fear nothing but the night,
Or some imperious firman
That bids the Faithful fight."
"They say some lads fear ladies
And truckle to them." "Who
Could be so weak? The Cadis
Rise up for me and you."
"But doctors, nay and princes,
Have troubles of their own,
Save those whom fire convinces....
I leave the stuff alone."
"And I...." Then both bethought them
That, howso strong and wise,
Their principles had caught them
On this mad enterprise.
"'Tis time to act with daring,
And rest," said he of Jask,
And swore a mighty swearing,
(And drained another flask).
"If I go on, attendant
Upon this woman's way,
May I become dependant
On your arrears of pay!"
"If I," said Captain Kerman,
"Should knuckle to my mate,
May I become a merman
And live on maggot-bait!"
"Then since we have discovered
That women need our strength"—
(The tavern-houris hovered)
"To hold them at arm's length,
Sit down in this rest-house, and
Tell me a tale among
The tales, one in your thousand!"
This was the story sung:
"I threw my love about you like fine raiment;
I let you kill my pride.
You passed me by, but smiled at me in payment,
And I was satisfied.
"I made my mind a plaything for your leisure,
Content to be ignored.
Body and soul I waited on your pleasure,
Waited—without reward.
"I have no faint repinings that we met, dear,
Or that I left you cold.
I rub my hands. You will be colder yet, dear,
Some day when you are old."
"Forbidden wine is mellow.
The sun has set. Of whom
Sing you this song, Brave Fellow?
Night is the ante-room
Breeze-sprinkled to keep cooler
The feasting-halls behind."
"She might have been my ruler
But for my Strength of Mind."
"That was the tune to whistle!
How have I longed to learn
The deeds of men of gristle
Like mine!..." "Tell me in turn
Some of your lore of women,
Whose wiles are deep as bhang.
Your strength shall teach to swim men
Who fall in love...." He sang:
"You came to me, and well you chose your quarry.
You told your tale, and well you played your rôle.
You spoke of suffering, and I was sorry
With all my heart, with all my soul.
'Out of the deep,' you said. I thought to save you,
And stunned myself upon the covered shoal.
Yet, poor deceptive shallows, I forgave you
With all my heart, with all my soul.
You sought whatever evil had not sought you.
In vain I strove to make your nature whole.
I did not know the market that had bought you
With all your heart, with all your soul.
If man had one pure impulse you would smudge it.
You had one gift, my pity, which you stole.
Now I will only tell you that I grudge it
With all my heart, with all my soul."
"Of whom this song, Brave Fellow?
The stars in heaven's black soil
Fold up their petalled yellow
That pays the angels' toil."
The lamp had burned its wick dim,
The pair had drunk their fill....
"I might have been her victim
But for my Strength of Will."
Then one said to the other:
"Such strength as yours and mine
Must put its foot down, brother,
And stay here—pass the wine—
Till, for the world's salvation,
Shall radiate from this den
The Great Confederation
Of Independent Men."
The last sour mule was saddled,
On went the caravan.
These twain turned on the raddled
Handmaidens of the han,
Blinked, cast them forth with loathing
Because the queen was fair,
And lest their lack of clothing
Should lay man's weakness bare.
White as a cloud in summer,
Slender as sun-shot rain—
Earth knows what moods become her—
The queen passed....
In her train
The Great Confederation
Trod with such wealth of Will
That, in its trepidation,
It never paid its bill.
VII
THE HEART OF THE SLAVE
But as they fared slave Obeidullah failed.
Devouring fever shook him like a rat,
And ere they reached Kashan his course was run.
Then freedom came towards him, and he spoke:
"Here is an eye of water, mulberry-trees,
A rest-house, and to me a stranger thing,
Rest. Caravan be strong, fare on with blessings
Whence you must forge your happiness—but I,
Possessed of peace, shall never see the end.
The heart within me has been fire so long
That now my body is smoke. I watch it drift
Life leaves me gently as a mistress goes
Before her time to meet the uncoloured days,
Saying: 'I have lived. Plead not. 'Twill be in vain.
You were the end of summer. I have passed
Out of the garden with fresh scents and dews
Upon me, out ere sunset with cool hands,
The supple tread of youth and glorying limbs
Firm as resolve, unblemished as my pride;
Passed ere a leaf be fallen, or losing fights
Begin, that smirch the memory of love....'
Sweet is the shade, and death's cool lips are welcome
After the burning kisses of the sun,
The strained embraces of my owner, Toil.
I shall remember her with gratitude
But no regret, as I lie here. The dawn
Biting the desert-edge shall not disturb me,
Nor green oases zigzagged through the heat
Like stepping-stones. The many-coloured hills,
Heaven's mutable emotions, these are past.
Beyond them I shall find security
Of tenure in the outstretched hands of God."
Thereat his fellows made lament, and urged:
"Sleep on and take your rest, but not for ever.
Time adds to strength, and you shall rise with us
Who wait. Already we foresee the coast.
A little while...." Slave Obeidullah raised
Himself and looked ahead with shining eyes:
"The moon is faint. A dust-cloud swirls.
Therein I see dim marching hosts:
Strange embassies and dancing girls,
Spice-caravans and pilgrims. Ghosts
Rise thick from this else fruitless plain,
A waste that every season chars.
Yet teeming centuries lie slain
And trodden in the road to Fars.
"The still, white, creeping road slips on,
Marked by the bones of man and beast.
What comeliness and might have gone
To pad the highway of the East!
Long dynasties of fallen rose,
The glories of a thousand wars,
A million lovers' hearts compose
The dust upon the road to Fars.
"No tears have ever served to hold
This shifting velvet, fathom-deep,
Though vain and ceaseless winds have rolled
Its pile wherein the ages sleep.
Between your fingers you may sift
Kings, poets, priests and charvadars.
Heaven knows how many make a drift
Of dust upon the road to Fars.
"The wraiths subside. And, One with All,
Soon, in the brevity of length,
Our lives shall hear the voiceless call
That builds this earth of love and strength.
Eternal, breathless, we shall wait,
Till, last of all the Avatars,
God finds us in his first estate:
The dust upon the road to Fars."
So still he lay, so still the pilgrims deemed
He was no longer there. The deepening shade
Covered him softly. With his latest breath
Slave Obeidullah looked upon the Queen:
"You whom I loved so steadfastly,
If all the blest should ask to see
The cause for which my spirit came
Among them with so little claim
To peace, this book should speak for me.
"I strove and only asked in fee
Hope of your immortality
Not mine—I had no other aim
You whom I loved.
"The Judge will bend to hear my plea,
And take my songs upon his knee.
Perhaps His hand will make the lame
Worthy to worship you, the same
As here they vainly tried to be,
You whom I loved."
Then, turned towards her, Obeidullah slept.
VIII
THE TALE OF THE CHEAPJACK
Among the fruit-trees still he slumbers. All
Mourned for their brother with one heavy heart.
Even Tous drooped, swaying weakly in his stride;
Until Farid Bahadur, cheapjack, spoke,
One bootlessly afoot whose years had brought
For profit this, to see existence clear
And empty as a solid ball of glass.
Erstwhile, he said, my peddling carried me
Clean through two empires like a paper hoop,
Setting me down upon the olive slopes
Where Smyrna nestles back to mother earth,
And so lures in the ocean. I filled my pack
With kerchiefs, beads, dross, chaffering with a Greek,
Although he vowed a much-loved partner's death
Left him no heart for it. He blew his nose,
Asking strange prices as a man distraught.
I had no heart to bargain while he crooned:
"Our loves were woven of one splendid thread,
But not our lives, though we had been, we twain,
Linked as in worship at the Spartan fane
Of him who brought his brother from the dead.
Ah, would our God were like his gods that said:
Such love as this shall not have flowered in vain,
And let the younger Castor live again
The space that Pollux lay with Death instead.
Dear, I had lain so gladly in the grave
Not for a part of time but for God's whole
Eternity, had died, yea oft, to save
Not half your life, but one short hour. Your soul
Was all too pure; mine had no right to ask
From heaven such mercy as a saviour's task.
"They say the Olympian grace was not content
With housing Death, but giving Love the key.
It set the troths that guided you and me
Among the jewels of the firmament;
And there they dwell for ever and assent
To each propitious ploughing of the sea.
The coasting-pilots of Infinity
Well know The Brothers. So your sails were bent,
Young fathomer of the blue. I linger here
With following gaze that tugs my heart-strings taut
All day; but every night an Argonaut
Slips through the streets and darkness, seaward, far
Beyond the limitations of his sphere
Into the vacant place beside a star."
So crooned he desolate in his dim shop,
Till I became all ears and had no eyes.
The fellow cheated me of three dinars.
IX
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DOOR
Slow into Kum the Glaring trailed
The caravan. Its courage failed
A moment. Only dust-clouds veiled
The sun, that overhead
From fields The Plough had turned to grain,
Star-honey laden on The Wain
And spices from the wind-domain,
Was baking angel-bread.
(Astronomers in Baghdad say
That Allah gave the Milky Way
To feed his guests, the dead.)
Even as the dead the pilgrims lay
Until the sun received his pay—
Man counts in gold, but he in grey—
Then, whining as one daft,
A voice crept to each sleeper's ear,
And one by one sat up to hear
It soughing like a Seistan mere
Where nothing ever laughed.
A blur at elbow on the floor
Cried: "Sleep! 'Tis but the tavern door
Amoaning in the draught."
"Ay," said the master of the inn,
"A black-faced gaper that lets in
The dark, my creditors, and kin!
Last month it strained my wrist, did
The lout, so hard it slams. This week
Claims it for fuel. See the leak
Of air it springs! Its hinges creak,
Its wood is warped and twisted.
'Tis heavy-hearted as a man,
Stark, crazy thing!... It feels uncann...."
The wheezing voice persisted.
"Earth bare me in Mazanderan,
Where, breaking her dead level plan,
Steep foliage opens like a fan
To hide her virgin blush;
And singing, caravan, like you
Brooks dance towards the Caspian blue
Past coolth wherein mauve turtles coo
To panthers in the rush,
That turn hill-pools to amethyst.
Here bucks drink deep and tigers tryst
Neck-deep in grasses lush.
"And there the stainless peaks are kissed
By heaven whose crowning mercy, mist,
With cloud-lands white as Allah's fist
Anoints their heads with rain.
We never dreamed, where nature pours,
That life could run as thin as yours—
A waif thirst-stricken to all fours—
Or verdure, but a vein
In sandscapes wincing from the sun
That burns your flesh and visions dun,
Crawl throbbing through the plain.
"I grew. My shadow weighed a ton;
I held a countless garrison;
My boughs were roads for apes to run
Around the white owl's niche.
The hum of bees, the blue jay's scream....
The forest came to love and teem
In me beside the vivid stream
Shot through with speckled fish;
Till, weary of my sheltered glen,
I craved a human denizen
Fate granted me my wish.
"Yea, I had longed (if slope and fen
Can love like this, the love of men
Must live above our nature's ken)
To see and shade the room,
To shield far-leaning the abode,
Wherein the souls of lovers glowed
To songs that dimmed the bulbul's ode ...
And man became my doom.
He dragged me through the dew-drenched brake,
And took the heart of me to make
A tavern-door at Kum."
The pilgrims sat erect, engrossed,
Or searched the crannies for a ghost.
"Ah, heed it not," implored the host;
"This hell-burnt father's son
Moans ever like a soul oppressed,
And takes the fancy of a guest,
And makes my house no house of rest:
I would its voice were gone.
Yet be indulgent, sirs! 'Tis old.
Next week it shall be burnt or sold.
A new—" The voice went on:
"Here have I stood while life unrolled
But not the tale my breezes told.
Moonlight alone conceals the cold
Drab city's lack of heart.
Here have I watched an hundred years
Bespatter me with blood and tears,
Yet leave man ever in arrears
Of where my monkeys start.
No more, dog-rose and meadow-sweet!
The harlot's musk and rotten meat
Blow at me from the mart.
"No more, clear streams and fairy feet!
But through my mouth the striving street
Drains in brown spate the men who eat
And drink and curse and die;
And out of me the whole night long
Reel revellers—O God, their song!...
Are there no mortals clean and strong,
Or do they pass me by?
I little thought that I should leave
For this the groves where turtles grieve
Far closer to the sky.
"Instead of every song-bird's note
I know the scales a merchant's throat
Can compass. I have learned by rote
The tricks of Copt and Jew;
Can tell if Lur or Afghan brawls,
The Armenian way of selling shawls
Softly, and how an Arab bawls
To rouse the raider's crew,
Lest ululating strings of slaves
Should take the kennel for their graves....
Raids! I have seen a few,
"Or wars, occasion dubs them—waves
Of Mongol sultans, Kurdish braves.
They—Find me words! the Simûn raves—
They worked ... 'tis called their will,
Battered me in—behold the dint—
With all their hearts that felt like flint,
Besmeared the city with the tint
Of sunset on my hill.
My leopards stalk my bucks at eve—
I shivered as I heard them heave—
At least they ate their kill.
"I followed that.... But men who weave
Such flowing robes of make-believe,
I think the flood was wept by Eve—
Some sportsman shot the dove—
These puzzled me, for God is good
And man His image—not of wood,
Thank God!—At last I understood
All ... all except their love.
I grew so hard that I could trace
His hand's chief glory in their race.
Perhaps He wore a glove."
Then one without made haste to smite
The malcontent. It opened. Night
Stood on the threshold dressed in white,
And myriad-eyed and blind.
The ostler murmured: "Some Afrit
Or bitter worm has entered it;
Nor jamb nor lintel seems to fit.
I know its frame of mind."
"Air stirs the dust upon the floor,"
The landlord cried. "Fool! Shut that door
Amoaning in the wind."
"My glade was deep, a lichened well
Of ether, limpid as a bell
Buoyed on the manifold ground-swell
Whose distance changed attires
As sun-stroked plush, a roundelay
Of all red-blue and purple grey,
And, at each rise and fall of day,
Snows dyed like altar fires
Licked through those loud green sheaves of copse,
Bent hyphens 'twixt the mountain-tops,
Mosques of my motley choirs.
"And I, who gave them bed and bower
For nights enduring but an hour
Mid blaring miles of trumpet-flower,
Leagues of liana-wreath,
I saw the rocks through leaves and lings,
Could blink the fangs and feel the wings,
Thrill with the elemental things
Of life and love and death.
The purity of air and brook
And song helped me to overlook
The rapine underneath.
"But you—no! one dream more: an elf,
Askip on ochre mountain-shelf,
Who once had seen a man himself.
I used his wand to gauge
The sheen of moths and peacocks' whir,
To plumb the jungle-aisles, to stir
The drifts of frankincense and myrrh,
And amorous lithe shapes that purr....
'Tis finished. Turn the page
To where man cased his bones in fat.
His mate moved like a tiger-cat
Until he built her cage.
"You, I have watched you all who sat
Successive round the food-stained mat,
And reckoned many who lived for that
Alone; have seen the mark
Of that last state the Thinking Beast
Peep through the foliage of the feast,
And crown its poet's flight with greased
Fingers that grope the dark;
Have heard a cleanlier bosom catch
Her breath, and fumble with my latch
Irresolute. The lark
"My inmates never feared to match
Bespoke the end. I belched the batch,
Rolling them down the street, a patch
Of dirt against the dawn.
Then in its stead there came a saint,
Inventor of a soul-complaint,
Who gave men's faith a coat of paint
Like mine, and made me yawn
With furtive wenching. Here have sighed
Exultant groom and weeping bride
Led like a captive fawn.
"This way passed those who marry lean
Girl-chattels ere their times of teen.
I knew a like but milder scene:
A hawk, small birds that cower.
How soon the chosen was brought back dead—
Poisoned, the hakim always said—
The husband groaned beside the bed,
Arose, and kept the dower,
But swept his conscience out with prayer.
Man took the angels unaware
When he became a power.
"And what of woman? On my stair
The merchants spread their gaudiest ware,
For which fools bought a love affair
That ended in a jerk.
Enough! To round the tamasha
A bloated thing came by, the Shah;
It grinned, and viziers fawned 'Ha! ha!'
Curs, brainless as a Turk.
And all the women in his train
Beheld him once and ne'er again,
And called his love their work.
"You see, my friends, I tired of this
Wild doubling in the chase of bliss.
Pards miss their spring as men their kiss,
And yet the quarry dies.
I learned the world's least mortal god,
Whose epitaph is Ichabod,
May sport till noon, but if he nod
Shall never more arise.
Then, caravan, you passed, and I
Have solved my riddle with a cry:
The sad are never wise.
"Your song was all that I had heard
In dreams beyond the wildest bird,
That rose above my yellow-furred
Basses that bell and roar.
It took the heart of me in tow
To heights that I had longed to know,
To the great deeps where lovers go
And find—and want—no shore.
In these alone is man fulfilled;
And gleaming in the air I build
My hope of him once more.
"For all the few that see truth whole,
And take its endlessness for goal,
And steer by stars as if no shoal
Could mar their firmament,
For all the few that sing and sail
Knowing their quest of small avail,
Thank God who gave them strength to fail
In finding what He meant...."
"Poets!" the landlord groaned, "and poor!
This house is cursed." He banged the door
Behind them as they went.
And distance placed soft hands upon their mouths.