He gave no time for reply, but turning at right angles through a gap threaded his way past piles of pots and sherds until he ran the sound to earth. Literally to earth--a circle of the solid earth spinning dizzily in front of a man buried to his waist. At least so it seemed at first to George Keene's ignorance of potters and their wheels. A circle, dazzling at its outer edge, clearer at the centre where something beneath a steady curved hand shot up, and bulged; then, as the whirr slackened, sank into a bomb of clay.
'Salaam alaikoom!' came a pleasant voice as the worker sat back in his seat-hole so as to ease his feet. He was a mild-faced old gentleman with nothing remarkable about him save a pair of shifty eyes--the light hazel eyes seen so rarely in a native's face.
'Salaam alaikoom,' returned Dan. 'The little sahib has never seen a wheel worked. Will you show him?'
'Wherefore not, Huzoor? The sahib could come to none better, seeing we of Hodinuggur have spun the wheel of life for years--for ages and ages and ages.'
The words blent with the rising cadence of the wheel as he leant forward to the task again. Faster and faster upon the wheel with a swaying motion. Only the potter's hand poised motionless above the whirring clay which showed--as children say--like a top asleep. Then suddenly came the turn of the potter's thumb, bringing a strange weird life with it. One protean curve after another swelling, sinking, shifting, falling. The eye could scarcely follow their swift birth and death, until the potter, sitting back once more, the slackening wheel disclosed the hollows and bosses.
'The clay is good,' he said, as if deprecating his own skill, 'and it fires well.'
'When the thumb does not slip,' put in Dan quietly. The potter turned to him in sudden interest.
'The Huzoor knows the sayings of the people, that is well; it is not often so. Yea! it slips--thus.' The wheel still span slowly, he shifted his hand almost imperceptibly and a deep furrow scored itself upon the biggest boss. 'So little does it,' he went on, 'a grit clinging to the skin--a wandering thought. It is Fate. Fuzl Elâhi, the potter, cannot help it.'
'Fuzl Elâhi? Then you are a Mohammedan?'
He shook his head. 'I am as my fathers were. The Moghuls call me so, the Hindus otherwise; but it means the same. By the grace of God, potter of Hodinuggur since time began. Lo! my fathers and my children are in the clay. I dug a grave in the dust for the boy; the girl dug hers for herself. It was deep, Huzoor. I search for it always; in vain, in vain.' The wheel set up its rhythmic hum once more, but the hands lay idle.