The Book of Khalid

LAR OF

t enjoy, or a pleasure in which the other could not share. They even slept under the same blanket, we learn, ate from the same plate, puffed at the same narghilah, which Shakib brought with him from Baalbek, and collaborated in writing to one lady-love! A condition of unexampled friendship this, of complete oneness. They had both cut themselves garments from the same cloth,

vague something which, in his spiritual enceinteship, he seemed to relish. Nothing? Not even the does and kangaroos that adorn the Park distracted or detained him? W

e to lose myself in a crowd, to buffet, so to speak, its waves, to nestle under their feathery crests. For the rolling waves of life, the tumbling waves of the sea, and the fiery waves

auburn hair, and cheeks that suggested the milk and cherry in the glass she rattled out to me. I was reading aloud the stanzas which she inspired, when Khalid, who was not listening, pointed out to me a woman whose

y country cultivate that shape. And why do they in America cultivate the reverse of it? Needless to say that both are pruriently titillating,––both distentions are damnably suggestive, quite killing. The American woman, from a fine sense

man begins to suffer from what the doctors call hebephrenia, the farther he draws away from such snares the nearer he gets to them. And these lusty Syrians could not repel the magnetic attraction of the polypiosis of what Shakib likens to the aliat (fattail) of our Asiatic sheep. Surely, there be more devils under such an aliat than under the hat of a Jesuit. And Khalid is the first 49 to disco

was a donke

f Baalbek, I tramp behind my

rden redolent of mystic

on the soft green gras

nes, and the cyclamens

ubies; the daisies kiss me in the eyes and lips;

range blossoms surrender themselves to the wooing breeze; a

, boy as boys go, q

, I ask, plucking t

st petal s

cyclamens, cover my face with the d

eath the wall, in the s

g, and the bulbuls flitting by wh

and

nder, the burro, and the burro-boy, ar

g, generous,

each other,

ase in Nature's real

nded, no one

hath Nature

in as I sleep

poplar, who carries me upon his

avy-haunched, pace up and do

I cry, and my

d his hand upon my m

the daisies, I saw them, bu

is hand upon my mou

y own groves, I cri

ulders in a huff, among the

hem, but I co

ue, the goblin, and

me, and towards

fairest cyclame

d the tears flow

n like the no

th my wing

on a benc

my hear

be a burro

leep among

own

ur the horizon for that vague something of his dreams; he has become far-sighted enough by the process to see the necessity of pursuing in America something more spiritual than peddling crosses and scapulars. Especially in this America, where the alphabet is spread broadcast, and free of charge. And so, he sets himself to the task of self-education. He feels the embryo stir within him, and in the squeamishness of enceinteship, he asks but for a few of the fruits of knowledge. Ah, but h

nd confidence and conceit, he enters another Park from which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are swings for the mind; toboggan-chutes for the soul; merry-go-rounds for the fancy; and many devious and alluring paths where one can lose himself for years. A sanitarium this for the hebephreniac. And like all sanitariums, you go into it with one disease a

pple joints, so to speak; a word that you can twist and roll out, flexible as a bamboo switch, resilient as a fine steel rapier. But once Shakib, after reading one of Khalid's first attempts, gets up in the night when his friend is asleep, takes from the bottom drawer of the peddling-box the evil-working dictionary, and places therein a grammar. This touch of delicacy, this fine piece of criticism, brief and neat, without words withal, Khalid this time is not slow to grasp and appreciate. He plunges, therefore, headlong into the grammar, turns a few somersaults in the mazes of Sibawai and Naftawai, and coming out with a broken noddle, writes on the door the following: "What do I care about your

e walked leisurely in flowing robes disserting a life-long dissertation on the origin and descent of a preposition. One day Shakib is amazed by finding the grammars page by page tacked on the walls of the cellar and Khalid pacing around leisurely lingering a moment before each page, as if he were in an art gallery. That is how he tackled his subject. And that is why he and Shakib begin to quarrel. The idea! That a fledgling should presume to pick flaws. To Shakib, who is textual to a hair, this is intolerable. And that state of oneness between them shall be subject hereafter to "the corrosive action of various unfriendly agents." For Khalid, who has never yet been snaffled, turns restively from the bit which his friend, for his own s

him? And is not loafing a necessary prelude to the travail? Khalid, of course, felt the necessity of this, not knowing the why and wherefor. And from the vast world of paper-bound souls, for he relished but pamphlets at the start––they do not make much smoke in the fire, he would say––from that vast world he could command the greatest of the great to help him support the loafi

l he read the Bible. And of the Prophets of the Old Testament he had an especial liking for Jeremiah and Isaiah. And once he bought a cheap prin

sieur

n Faith, enjoining man to acknowledge himself vile, base, abominable, and obliging him at the same time to aspire towards a resemblance of his Maker. Now, I see in this a foreshadowing of the theory of evolution, nay a divine warrant for it. Nor is it the Christian religion alone which unfolds

erem

derets of my tears. And who knows who punctured thine, O Jeremiah? Perhaps a daughter of Tamar had stuck a bodkin in thine eye, and in lamenting thine own fate––Pardon me, O Jeremiah. Melikes not all these tears of thine. Nor did Zion and her children in Juhannam, I am sure.... Instead of a scroll in thy hand, I would have thee hold a harp. Since King David, Allah has

e complete history of this Prophet in Khalid's cellar. For Khalid himself neve

posture, he took up his lute and trolled a favourite ditty. For three days and three nights that picture hung on the wall. And on the morning of the fourth day––it was a cold December morning, I r

baptised in the same fire with the Prophe