Light was not. All was still. The caravan
Had ceased its song and motion by the bed
Wherein the hill-stream tosses sleeplessly,
The only sound, save one staccato note
Interminably piped by tiny owls.
The camp lay balmed in slumber, as the dead
Are straitened in white trappings. Then a voice,
Deeper than any dead black mountain pool
Or blacker well where devils cool by day,
Seemed to commune with Dreamer-of-the-Age,
Who, peering through the cloak about his head,
Challenged: "Who speaks?" The voice replied: "A friend
Unknown to you." ... It was old Peacock Tous,
The great grey camel with the crimson tail
On whom the queen was wont to ride. He said:
"Sheikh, I was born among the Bakhtiari,
The shelter of their hawthorn vales was mine;
For me, unbroken to the loads men carry,
The breeze that crowns their uplands glowed as wine
To drink. I, Tous, the Peacock, whom men call so
Because I ever moved as one above
The common herd, was mad and merry. Also
I knew not yet the prickled herb of Love.
"Spring tricked the desert out with flowered patterns
For me to tread like flowered carpets wrought
In patience by my master's painted slatterns—
He said that only Persian women fought.
Ah, youth is free and silken-haired and leggy!
No camel knows why Allah makes it end,
But He is wiser. Me the tribe's Il-Beggi
Spied out and sent as tribute to a friend,
"A dweller in black tents, a nomad chieftain
Of Khamseh Arabs or unruled Kashgai,
Whose cattle-raids and rapines past belief stain
The furthest page of camel-history.
And shamefully the ragged sutlers thwacked us,
Until I learned, as to this manner born,
That pride must find a mother in the cactus
And hope the milk of kindness in the thorn.
"O Sheikh, I found. A milk-white nakeh followed
The drove of males, and I would lag behind
With her, no matter how the drivers holloa'ed—
Man never doubts that all but he are blind.
At nightfall, when our champing echoed surly
Beyond the cheerful circle of the fire,
Something within me whispered, and thus early
I bore the burden of the world's desire.
"But I was saddled with the will of Allah,
Since one there was more fleet of foot than I,
The chosen of the chief of the Mehallah,
Whose nostrils quivered as he passed me by.
To her, beside his paces and his frothing,
My steadfastness was common as the air,
My passion and my patience were as nothing,
Because fate chose to make my rival fair.
"I suffered and was silent—some said lazy—
Until the seasons drove us to the plain.
The nomads sold me then to a Shirazi.
I never met my happiness again,
But trod the same old measure back and forward,
And passed a friend as seldom as a tree.
Oh, heaviness of ever going shoreward,
Of bringing all fruition to the sea!
"For I have fared from sea to sea like you, sirs,
And with your like, not once but many times.
Your path acclaims me eldest of its users,
It tells my step as I foresee your rhymes.
I know by heart a heartache's thousandth chapter
As you have read the preface of delight.
The silence you shall enter, I have mapped her.
O singing caravan, I was To-night
"Long ere you dreamed. I dreaming of my lady
Became the cargo-bearer we call Self.
Two hundredweight of flesh that spouted Sa'di,
A restless bag of bones intent on pelf,
Have straddled me in turn.... Hashish and spices,
Wheat, poisons, satins, brass, and graven stone,
I, Tous, have borne all human needs and vices
As solemnly as had they been my own.
"Moon-faced sultanas blue with kohl a-pillion,
Grey ambergris, pink damask-roses' oil,
Deep murex purple, beards or lips vermilion
As Abu Musa's flaming scarlet soil
I have borne—and dung and lacquer. I have flooded
Bazaars with poppy-seed and filigree.
Men little guess the stuff that I have studied,
Or what their vaunted traffic seems to me.
"I am hardened to all wonderments and stories—
My ears have borne the hardest of my task—
I have carried pearls from Lingah up to Tauris,
And Russian Jews from Lenkoran to Jask.
I have watched fat vessels crammed by sweating coolies
With all the rubbish that the rich devise,
And often I have wondered who the fool is
That takes it all, and whom the fool supplies.
"Yet ran my thoughts on her, though cedar rafters
Were laid on me, or mottled silk and plush,
Although the tinkling scales of varied laughters
Rode me from Bandar Abbas to Barfrush,
Or broken hearts from Astara to Gwetter.
All ironies have made their moving house
Of me. I smile to think how many a letter
Has passed from loved to lover thanks to Tous
"The loveless. Think you men alone are lonely,
My masters? I have also worshipped one,
Have built my days of faith and service only,
And while I worshipped all my life was gone.
I spent the funds of life in growing older,
In heaping fuel on a smothered fire.
See how my tale is rounded! On my shoulder
I bear the burden of your world's desire.
"Yet keep that inner smile; and never show it
Though the Account be nothing—shorn of her.
Be wise, O Sheikh. Pray God to be a poet
Lest life should make you a philosopher,
Or lest the dreams of which you had the making
Should prove to be such stuff as still I trail,
And bring your heart, my withers, nigh to breaking
When at the last the Bearer eyes the Bale,
"As you shall penetrate this day or morrow
The miracle of willing servitude,
And yet believe therein. It is the sorrow
And not the love that asks to be subdued;
It is the mirage not the truth that trammels
The travelling feet. Ah, if men only knew
How their brief frenzies move the mirth of camels,
Our rests were longer and our journeys few.
"Old Tous is up. The camp is struck and ready
For fresh emprise. Dawn sifts the clay-blue sky
For gold. Now see how dominant and steady
I prose along that have no mind to fly.
This is my lesson: over sand or shingle,
Blow hot, blow cold, by mountain, plain and khor,
Coming and going, I must set a-jingle
My own deep bell.... And you must ask for more!"
He ceased. White on the mirror of the air
His breath made patterns. In a ruined farm
Red cocks blared out and shouted down the owls.
The drivers rubbed their eyes. Another day
Among the days was starting on its march....
Above the pilgrims fallen to their prayers
Old Tous stood upright, blinking at the sun.