"Ps'sh" commented Auntie Rosebody scornfully. "What are flowers to rhubarb? And I have enough for two stews, so Râkiya Begum may lay her tartness to that--if she will eat of it, though mayhap at her age she hath forgotten her youth. As for me, 'twill be a Day of Resurrection indeed to taste of it again, for I have dreamt of it all these years."
Akbar caught up the child with a sudden laugh, and setting him astride his shoulders began the descent to the camp below.
"'Tis as well, most reverend," he said "that some dreamers dream true."
Did he think as he spoke of a woman who had dreamed her dream through to the Truth, whose hiding place is immortality, whose shadow is death?
Perhaps he did. Perhaps, even now, on those misty spring mornings when the sun chases the snow vapours over the blue gentians and rosy alpine primulas that edge the snow patches on the peaks of the Pir Panjal, the Self that lay behind the Self that was called Akbar sits, enshrouded by the mists and looks out over the Empire of the Great Mogul.
What does the Prince of Dreamers think of it?
F. A. Steel.
28th January, 1908.
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1]: Memoirs of Gulbadan Begum.