was off to his own country in the Month of Pilgrimages. He broke the long journey at Bokhara, to buy a horse for the trip South, to exchange his Egyptian money for a rupee draft on a Hindu banker in Afghanistan, and to buy sweets and silks for the many cousins in his native village.
He had left there sixteen years before, a child of seven, when his father, a poor man, but eager for gain, and sensing no chance for barter and profit in the crumbling basalt ridges of the foot-hills, had gone West—to Cairo. There he and his father—the mother had died in giving him birth—had lived all these years; all these years he had spent in that city of smoky purple and dull orange, but never had he been of Cairo. The tang of the home land had not left him; always his heart had called back to the sweep and snow of the hills, and he had fed his love with gossamer memories and with the brave tales which his father, Ali Khan, told him when the homesickness was in his nostrils and when the bazaar gold of Cairo seemed gray and useless dross.
Of gold there had come plenty. Ali Khan had prospered, and in his tight little shop in the Gamalyiehy, the Quarter of the Camel-Drivers, he had held his own with the Red Sea traders who meet there, and cheat and fight and give one another the full-flavored abuse of near-by Asia.
Yar Khan had lived the haphazard life of Eastern childhood, with no lessons but those of the crowded, crooked streets and an occasional word of prosy Koranic wisdom from some graybeard among his father's customers. When he had reached his fifteenth year, manhood had come—sudden and a little cruel as it comes to Asians. On that day, his father had taken him into the shop, and, with a great gesture of his lean arms, had pointed at the dusty confusion of his stock-in-trade; at the mattings full of yellow Persian tobacco, the pipe bowls of red clay, the palm-leaf bags containing coffee and coarse brown sugar, the flat green boxes filled with arsenic and rhubarb and antimony and tafl and sal-ammoniac.
"He of great head becomes a chief, and he of great feet a shepherd," Ali Khan had said, ridiculing Fate after the manner of the hill-bred. "Thou art blood of my blood. From this day on, thou wilt be a trader, and thou wilt prosper. Gold will come to thy hands—unasked, like a courtezan."
Ali Khan had been right. Together, father and son had prospered. They had heaped gold on clinking gold, and of gold, too, had been the father's endless talk, praising the cold metal at yawning length, dwelling, as it were, on the outer husk of things; and when Yar Khan's softer mind rebelled at the hard philosophy Ali Khan would laugh and say: "Thou art right, little son. Gold is the breath of a thief. Gold is a djinn. Gold is an infidel sect. But—" with a shrewd wink—"give gold to a mangy dog—and the people will call him Sir Dog. For gold is strength!"
It was only in the evenings, when they had put up the heavy wooden shutters of their shop and were returning to their tiny whitewashed living-house in the Suk-en-Nahassim, that often something like a veil of discontent would fall over the older man's shrill greed.
"Gold buys this—and that—and this," he would say, in a hushed voice, pointing at some rich Pasha's silent, extravagant house, with its projecting cornices, its bulbous balconies of fretted woodwork supported by gigantic corbels and brackets, and the dim oil lamp glimmering above the carved gate—"gold buys this—and no more!"—and when a woman of the Egyptians—a woman swathed from head to foot, with only the eyes showing—crossed his path, he would cry, "They do not wear veils, at home, in the hills."
Then, quite suddenly, he would break into harsh laughter and add, "But veils cost gold. Yar Khan, and we sell veils … thou and I—in the Gamalyieh!"
Yar Khan understood that his father was homesick. But when he begged him to return to the hills Ali Khan would reply with the proverb which says that the cock leaves home for four days only—and returns a peacock. He would add, with a crooked smile: "Of what use the peacock's green tail on the dung-hills? Of what use the gold of Egypt on the barren rocks?"—and then again the talk would he of seasons and of the gold which comes with the shifting seasons' swing.
But Yar Khan would not understand why his father did not return to the hills, why he preferred to live in Cairo—between the dusty shop, and the tiny whitewashed living-house—up and down, up and down, like a buffalo putting his shaggy back to the water-wheel—heavy and slow and blind. He only knew that his father was eating out his heart with longing for the chill, dark pines; and his own homesickness—though his memories were vague—would be upon his shoulder like a stinging brand.