"God knows! Every full moon I stretch my sheet on the ground and dance to please my fairy. Then when I fall into the trance I ask the old question, 'Where is Deen Ali's gold?' But there is no answer in the morning. Now, if the fairy cannot tell--"
Suttu laughed. "Dost not, may be, forget the answer? The black bottle steals thy brains--"
'"Tis not the bottle," muttered Shâhbâsh, sulkily, as he gathered up his perquisites. "'Tis the fairy steals my brains. For sure there be not rum enough in it nowadays--"
So they walked home to the mosque-like tomb in the date-grove, she with her sheaf of lotus, he with his shovel and shroud.
II.
Suttu's great-great-grandfather had been a saint of the first water--a double-distilled, above-proof performer of miracles; his holiness being strong enough to stand two generations of dilution and still leave spiritual distinction to his descendants. Yet the difference in the saintship of Deen Ali, the original, and Inâm Ali, the present incumbent of the shrine, lay more in their surroundings than in themselves. The former, according to tradition, had lived for ten years in a trance, oblivious of all save the touch of a certain prayer-carpet on his feet; a carpet brought from holy Mecca, which had been used--again according to tradition--by the Prophet himself. Then sight, speech, action, were restored to Deen Ali for a space, and while earth and sky wore the glorious apparel of sunrise and sunset, his soul came back in praise and prayer.
Inâm Ali inherited the trance, but folk called it paralysis, and the death in life yielded to carnal, not spiritual, food. Doubtless physiologically it was quite as wonderful that twice a day, regularly as clock-work, the half-dead organism should accept nourishment; practically it was not so impressive.
But other things had changed too in the seventy-and-odd years since Deen Ali had planted the Arabian date-stones he had also brought back from holy Mecca in the land granted to his saintship. Curious holdings these, burdened at times by quaint conditions in return for official canonization; for in those days saintship paid. In this case the offerings of the faithful had taken visible shape in the blue-tiled tomb where Deen Ali's body lay under a stucco roly-poly twelve feet long. Whether this length awarded to saintly tombs, which contrasts so oddly with the curtness of those allowed to the laity, has reference to the extent of piety, or whether some Mohammedan exemplar of old really was of unusual stature, is a moot point. Certain it is that in upper India, as elsewhere, the "unco guid" are tedious even when at rest.
The blue-green dome of the saint's tomb, therefore, soared up into the green-grey plumes of the palms, as a record of past munificence; and round it the green-blue parrots circled and swept till the wearied eye sought relief in the gold clusters of dates above and the gold sand below.
Gold! If report said true, golden indeed with other records of munificence. But where? That secret lay hid in Inâm Ali's paralyzed brain. He must have known; for, despite the slackness of modern offerings, there had never been any want in the mud hovel hitched on to the tomb; until Suttu, coming in one evening with her veil full of dates, had found the old man quite unconscious on the saint's high wooden bed, which still stood over the grave under the dome.