he lives in Bokhara, in the old quarter of the desert town that the natives call Bokhara-i-Shereef. He has a store in a bazaar not far from the Samarkand Gate, where he sells the gold-threaded brocades of Khiva and the striped Bokhariot belts that the caravan-men exchange for brick-pressed tea across the border in Chinese Turkestan, and where, methodically filling his pipe with tobacco from the carved pumpkin-shell at his elbow, he praises the greatness of Russia and the wisdom of the czar.
There, at noon every day, his ten-year-old son comes to him, bringing clean and well-spiced food from the market.
"Look at him!" he says often, proudly pinching the supple arms of the lad, and exhibiting him as he would a pedigreed stallion. "Sinews and muscles and a far-seeing eye, and no nerves—none at all. Because of which I give thanks to Allah the Wise-judging, the opener of the door of knowledge with the key of His mercy. For one day my son will wear a plaited, green coat and a tall chugerma cap of white fur, and serve the czar. He will learn to shoot straight, very straight, and then," he adds, with a meaning smile, if he happens to be speaking to one of the three men whom he trusts,—"then he will desert. But he will return, perhaps,"—rapidly snapping his fingers to ward off misfortunes,—"he will return to his regiment, and he will not be very much punished."
A true Russian man he calls himself, and his name, too, has a Russian purring and deep ringing to it—"Pavel Alikhanski." Also there is talk in the town that he is in the pay of that great Bokharan magnate, the kushbegi, friend of the Russians, bringing tales to him about his Highness the ameer, and receiving milled gold for the telling.
But ten years ago, when I called him friend, his name was not Alikhanski. Then he called himself Wazir Ali-Khan Sulaymani, that last name giving clue to his nation and race; for "Sulaymani" means "descendant of King Solomon," and it is known in half the world that the Afghans claim this resplendent Hebrew potentate as their breed's remote sire.
In those days he lived in a certain gray and turbulent city not far from the northeastern foot-hills of the Himalayas, where three great empires link elbows and swap lies and intrigues and occasional murders, and where the Afghan mist falls down like a veil of purple-gray veil. In those days neither Russia nor the czar was on his lips, and he called himself an Herati, an Afghan from Herat, city-bred and city-courteous, but with a strain of maternal blood that linked him to the mountains and the sharp, red feuds of the mountains. But city-bred he was, and as such he lisped Persian, sipped coffee flavored with musk, and gave soft answer to harsh word.
He did not keep shop then, and none knew his business, though we all tried to find out, chiefly I, serving the Ameer of Afghanistan in that far city, and retailing the gossip of the inner bazaars from the border to the rose gardens of Kabul, where the governor sits in state and holds durbar.
But money he had, also breeding, also a certain winsome gentleness of spirit and speech, a soft moving of high-veined hands, well-kept, and finger-nails darkened with henna in an effeminate manner.
He spent many a day in the hills, the Khwadja Hills, called poetically Hill A12, C5, K-K67, and so forth, in the Russian and British survey-maps. There he would shoot bighorns and an occasional northern tiger that had drifted down in the wake of the outer Mongolian snows. This was strange, for an Afghan does not kill for the sake of killing, the sake of sport. He kills only for the sake of food or of feud.
Nor could he explain even to himself why three or four times every month he left his comfortable town house and went into the hills, up and down, following the call of the wilderness; through the gut of the deep-cleft Nadakshi Pass; up beyond the table-lands, pleasant with apricot- and mulberry-trees; still farther up to the smoke-dimmed height of the Salt Hills, where he stained his soft, city-bred hands with the dirt of the tent-peg and the oily soot of his rifle.
Once I asked him, and he laughed gently.
"My mother came from the hills," he replied, "and it is perhaps her blood screaming in my veins which makes me take to the hills, to kill bighorn and snow-tiger instead of killing brother Afghans."
"You do not believe in feuds?" I was astonished, for I was young in those days.
Again he laughed.