But we’ll no more of this! Too tragic, too much like fiction it sounds, that here abruptly we must end this Chapter.
CHAPTER VIII
THE KAABA OF SOLITUDE
Disappointed, distraught, diseased,––worsted by the Jesuits, excommunicated, crossed in love,––but with an eternal glint of sunshine in his breast to open and light up new paths before him, Khalid, after the fatal episode, makes away from Baalbek. He suddenly disappears. But where he lays his staff, where he spends his months of solitude, neither Shakib nor our old friend the sandomancer can say. Somewhither he still is, indeed; for though he fell in a swoon as he saw Najma on her caparisoned palfrey and the decorated Excellency coming up along side of her, he was revived soon after and persuaded to return home. But on the following morning, our Scribe tells us, coming up to the booth, he finds neither Khalid there, nor any of his few worldly belongings. We, however, have formed a theory of our own, based on certain of his writings in the K. L. MS., about his mysterious levitation; and we believe he is now somewhither whittling arrows for a coming combat. In the Lebanon mountains perhaps. But we must not dog him like the Jesuits. Rather let us reverence the privacy of man, the sacredness of his religious retreat. For no matter where he is in the flesh, we are metaphysically certain of his existence. 182 And instead of filling up this Chapter with the bitter bickerings of life and the wickedness and machination of those in power, let us consecrate it to the divine peace and beauty of Nature. Of a number of Chapters in the Book of Khalid on this subject, we choose the one entitled, My Native Terraces, or Spring in Syria, symbolising the natural succession to Khalid’s Winter of destiny. In it are signal manifestations of the triumph of the soul over the diseases and adversities and sorrows of mortal life. Indeed, here is an example of faith and power and love which we reckon sublime.
“The inhabitants of my terraces and terrace walls,” we translate, “dressed in their Sunday best, are in the doorways lounging or peeping idly through their windows. And why not? It is Spring, and to these delicate, sweet little creatures, Spring is the one Sunday of the year. Have they not hugged the damp, dark earth long enough? Hidden from the wrath of Winter, have they not squatted patiently round the primitive, smokeless fire of the mystic depths? And now, the rain having partly extinguished the inner, hidden flame, they come out to bask in the sun, and drink deeply of the ambrosial air. They come, almost slain with thirst, to the Mother Fountain. They come out to worship at the shrine of the sweet-souled, God-absorbed Rabia of Attar. In their bright, glowing faces what a delectable message from the under world of romance and enchantment! Their lips are red with the kisses of love, in whose alembics, intangible, 183 unseen, the dark and damp of the earth are translated into warmth and colour and shade. Ay, these dear little children, unfolding their soft green scrolls and reading aloud such odes on Modesty and Beauty, are as inspiring as the star-crowned night. And every chink in my terrace walls seems to breathe a message of sweetness and light and love.
“Know you not the anecdote about the enchanting Goddess Rabia, as related by Attar in his Biographies of Sufi Mystics and Saints? Here it is. Rabia was asked if she hated the devil, and she replied, ‘No.’ Asked again why, she said, ‘Being absorbed in love, I have no time to hate.’ Now, all the inhabitants of my terraces and fields seem to echo this sublime sentiment of their Goddess. The air and sunshine, nay, the very rocks are imbued with it. See, how the fissures in the boulders yonder seem to sympathise with the gaps in the terrace walls: the cyclamen leaves in the one are salaaming the cyclamen flowers in the other. O, these terraces would have delighted the heart of the American naturalist Thoreau. He could not have desired stone walls with more gaps in them. But mind you, these are not dark, ugly, hollow, hopeless chinks. Behind every one of them lurks a mystery. Far back in the niches I can see the busts of the poets who wrote the poems which these beautiful wild flowers are reading to me. Yes, the authors are dead, and what I behold now are the flowers of their amours. These are the offspring of their embraces, the crystallised dew of their love. Yes, this one single, simple act of love brings forth an infinite variety of 184 flowers to celebrate the death of the finite outward shape and the eternal essence of life perennial. In complete surrender lies the divineness of things eternal. This is the key-note of the Oriental mystic poets. And I incline to the belief that they of all bards have sung best the song of love. In rambling through the fields with these beautiful children of the terraces, I know not what draws me to Al-Fared, the one erotic-mystic poet of Arabia, whose interminable rhymes have a perennial charm. Perhaps such lines as these,––
‘All that is fair is fairer when she rises,
All that is sweet is sweeter when she is here;
And every form of beauty she surprises
With one brief word she whispers in its ear:
‘Thy wondrous charms, O let them not deceive thee;
They are but borrowed from her for a while;
Thine outward guise and loveliness would grieve thee,
If in thine inmost soul she did not smile.
‘All colours, forms, into each other merging,
Are woven on her Loom of Unity;
For she alone is One in All diverging,
And she alone is absolute and free.’
“Now, I will bring you to a scene most curiously suggestive. Behold that little knot of daisies pressing around the alone anemone beneath the spreading leaves of the colocasia. Here is a rout at the Countess Casiacole’s, and these are the débutantes crowding around the Celebrity of the day. But would they do so if they were sensible of their own worth, if they 185 knew that their idol, flaunting the crimson crown of popularity, had no more, and perhaps less, of the pure essence of life than any of them? But let Celebrity stand there and enjoy her hour; to-morrow the Ploughman will come.