And now, Reader, were we really romancing, we should here dilate of the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to Baalbek. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, the welkin starless, the night pitch-black, and our poor Dreamer is suffering from his wounds.
CHAPTER IX
THE STONING AND FLIGHT
“And whence the subtle thrill of joy in suffering for the Truth,” asks Khalid. “Whence the light that flows from the wounds of martyrs? Whence the rapture that triumphs over their pain? In the thick of night, through the alcoves of the mountains, over their barren peaks, down through the wadi of oblivion, silently they pass. And they dream. They dream of appearance in disappearance; of triumph in surrender; of sunrises in the sunset.
“A mighty tidal wave leaves high upon the beach a mark which later on becomes the general level of the ocean. And so do the great thinkers of the world,––the poets and seers, the wise and strong and self-denying, the proclaimers of the Religion of Man. And I am but a scrub-oak in this forest of giants, my Brothers. A scrub-oak which you might cut down, but not uproot. Lop off my branches; apply the axe to my trunk; make of my timber charcoal for the censers of your temples of worship; but the roots of me are deep, deep in the soil, beyond the reach of mortal hands. They are even spreading under your tottering palaces and temples....
“I dream of the awakening of the East; of puissant Orient nations rising to glorify the Idea, to build temples 326 to the Universal Spirit––to Art, and Love, and Truth, and Faith. What if I am lost in the alcoves of the hills, if I vanish forever in the night? The sun that sets must rise. It is rising and lighting up the dark and distant continents even when setting. Think of that, ye who gloat over the sinking of my mortal self.
“No; an idea is never too early annunciated. The good seed will grow among the rocks, and though the heavens withhold from it the sunshine and rain. It is because I will it, nay, because a higher Will than mine wills it, that the spirit of Khalid shall yet flow among your pilgrim caravans, through the fertile deserts of Arabia, down to the fountain-head of Faith, to Mecca and Medina,” et cetera.
This, perhaps the last of the rhapsodies of Khalid’s, the Reader considering the circumstances under which it was written, will no doubt condone. Further, however, in the K. L. MS. we can not now proceed. Certainly the Author is not wanting in the sort of courage which is loud-lunged behind the writing table; his sufficiency of spirit is remarkable, unutterable. But we would he knew that the strong do not exult in their strength, nor the wise in their wisdom. For to fly and philosophize were one thing, and to philosophize in prison were another. Khalid this time does not follow closely in the way of the Masters. But he would have done so, if we can believe Shakib in this, had not Mrs. Gotfry persuaded him to the contrary. He would have stood in the Turkish Areopagus at Constantinople, defended himself somewhat Socratic before 327 his judges, and hung out his tung on a rickety gibbet in the neighborhood of St. Sophia. But Mrs. Gotfry spoiled his great chance. She cheated him of the glory of dying for a noble cause.