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By Root 14078 0

the festival in the half-darkness of the hot night, and at last the Magzub came to a long broken wall of earth-bricks which had once demarcated gardens now abandoned and houses now derelict. The noise of the fair had diminished to a hum, but a steam-engine still pealed from somewhere near at hand. They walked now in a peninsula of darkness, unable to gauge relative distances, like wanderers in an unknown desert. But the Magzub had become more erect now, and walked more quickly, with the eagerness of a fox that is near its earth. He turned at last into a great deserted yard, slipping through a hole in the mud-brick wall. Narouz was afraid he might lose trace of him among these shattered fragments of dwellings and dust-blown tombs. He came around a corner full upon him — the figure of a man now swollen by darkness into a mirage of a man, twelve foot high. ‘O Magzub’ he called softly,

‘give praise to God,’ and all of a sudden his apprehension gave place,

as it always did when there was violence to be done, to a savage exultation as he stepped forward into the radius of this holy man’s power, loosening the dagger and half-drawing it from the sheath. The fanatic stepped back once and then twice; and suddenly they were in a shaft of light which, leaking across the well of dark-ness from some distant street-lamp, set them both alive, giving to each other only a lighted head like a medallion. Dimly Narouz saw the man’s arms raised in doubt, perhaps in fear, like a diver, and resting upon some rotten wooden beam which in some forgotten era must have been driven into the supporting wall of a byre as a foundation for a course of the soft earth-brick. Then the Magzub

turned half sideways to join his hands, perhaps in prayer, and with precise and deft calculation Narouz performed two almost simul-taneous acts. With his right hand he drove his dagger into the wood, pinning the Magzub’s arms to it through the long sleeves of his coarse gown; with his left he seized the beard of the man, as one might seize a cobra above its hood to prevent it striking. Lastly, instinctively, he thrust his face forward, spreading his split lip to the full, and hissing (for deformity also confers magical powers in the East) in almost the form of an obscene kiss, as he whispered ‘O

beloved of the Prophet.’

They stood like this for a long moment, like effigies of a for-gotten action entombed in clay or bronze, and the silence of the night about them took up its palpitating proportions once more. The Magzub breathed heavily, almost plaint ive ly, but he said nothing; but now staring into those terrible eyes, which he had seen that evening burning like live coals, Narouz could discern no more power. Under the cartoon image of the crayon, they were blank and lustreless, and their centres were void of meaning, hollow, dead. It was as if he had pinned a man already dead to this corner of the wall in this abandoned yard. A man about to fall into his arms and breathe his last.

The knowledge that he had nothing to fear, now that the Mag-zub was ‘not in his hour’, flooded into Narouz’ mind on waves of sadness — apologetic sadness: for he knew he could measure the divinity of the man, the religious power from which he took refuge in madness. Tears came into his eyes and he released the saint’s beard, but only to rub the matted hair of his head with his hand and whisper in a voice full of loving tears ‘Ah, beloved of the Prophet!

Ah! Wise one and beloved’ — as if he were caressing an animal —

as if the Magzub now had transformed himself into some beloved hunting-dog. Narouz ruffled his ears and hair, repeating the words in the low magical voice he always used with his favourite animals. The magician’s eye rolled, focused and became bleary, like that of a child suddenly overcome with self-pity. A single sob broke from his very heart. He sank to a kneeling position on the dry earth with both hands still crucified to the wall. Narouz bowed and fell with him, comforting him with hoarse inarticulate sounds. Nor was this feigned. He was in a passion of reverence