Alas! 'Twas time to go—"Conceal the wine,
The purple and the yellow infidel!"—
Rice cooked in saffron, honey-cakes, and mast
With many-coloured shirini were all
Packed up in paunches capon-lined....
The Queen
Sailed through the city, mounted high on Tous,
Full in the moonlight, purer than the moon,
Whose beauty, being weighed with hers, the scale
Sent up to heaven and left the Queen on earth....
Followed quick tumbles to the lambent street,
Graspings of shoes, and search for garments lost,
With tunes that mounted all awry as flame
Draught-blown, short breaths and straggling feet.
The Dreamer
Reddened and drooped his head; for at the Gate
Sat a portentous Sheikh, thrice great in girth,
Ali-el-Kerbelaï, Known-of-Men,
To whom—he slept all day—his nightly school
Resorted in the porch. He saw, and shrugged
His shoulders, rounded in glory like the hills
That drift and clash about the Gulf of Pearls—
Bahreinis tell the tale lest rival dhows
Should venture into trade—and thus held forth:
"Gossips, I have watched fools wander through this gate
In generations. Never have I seen
Men so bewitched by one closed palanquin,
So little fain to chatter with the great,
So blind, or single-eyed, they did not see
Ali-el-Kerbelaï, even me.
"Poor souls! Dusk swamps our wriggling thoroughfares
Like trenches; and I rub my hands to think
How I to-night in coolth shall sleep and drink,
While sunrise takes these vagrants unawares.
Madmen set out each day to beard the sun,
And seventy years ago Your Slave was one.
"When all the world was young, that is when I
Was young, I promised Allah to be wise,
And started on the road of enterprise
That leads towards the snow-capped hills of Why,
Passing my hand across my shaven brow
Heavy with all the lower lore of How."
Ali-el-Kerbelaï sighed his soul
Out of his nostrils pious and serene,
For the swift curtain of the night had slid
Along the rings of stillness, as he peered
Into the plain. The singing caravan
Had dwindled slowly to a speck of white.
Then said the sage: "Behold they go to nothing,
These lovers, these far-eyed. To think they passed
Within a foot of wisdom and my robe!
Alas, they passed and knew not. 'Tis the risk
Of all such noisy dreamers. Ah, my head
Pities.... Well, God is great. And God made me.
"Thus first I reached Mohammerah, whose sheikh
In speechless gratitude besought a boon—
To make me eunuch in his anderûn—
For I had talked away his stomach-ache.
And of this epoch I need only say
I had fresh dates for dinner every day.
"But I was young. I spurned the unmanly job,
For I loved conquest, and the world lay flat
Before me like a purple praying-mat,
And all young women made my heart kebob,
Until the sheikh conceived himself disgraced.
Then I took ship from Basra—in some haste.
"We put to sea, fair sirs, a foul-faced sea
Puckered with viciousness and green with hate
Of all the sons of Adam; and black fate
Conspired with her to take account of me,
For all the Jinn who lurk among the gales
Came down to fecundate our bellied sails.
"They blew. They thrust my skull against the sky,
The jade-backed Jinn disguised as ocean-swell,
But I saw through them.... Down we went to hell,
Where Iblis tried to teach me blasphemy
In vain. No devil's wile could make me speak.
Thus I learned self-control. (I was so weak.)
"We drifted past bare cliff and jungle sedge,
Past spouting loose volcanoes known as whales,
And sirens that blew kisses with their tails,
Till we fell over the horizon's edge,
Fell sheer three thousand parasangs. And there
I first discovered that the world is square.
"We were in China, sir. The Home of Yellows,
Soil, porcelain, manuscripts, men.... Here I spent
Six weeks in stuffing to my heart's content
The thought-scraps given to these whoreson fellows
By heaven. My zeal picked all tradition's locks,
And knowledge opened like a lacquered box
"Wrought with strange figures.... Now I learned by heart
Eleven score ways of dodging every sin.
So, having sucked the marrow from Pekin,
I planned with Allah that I should depart,
And having thus obtained a ruly wind
I shone like lightning through the schools of Hind.
"I shall say little of Hind. Its mouth is wide
With sacred texts and precepts packed in lyrics
For carriage, verse unversed in our empirics.
I grasped all Indian knowledge like a bride
Without a dower, enjoyed and let her go,
Giving God thanks that only Persians know."
The singing caravan shrank in a clear
Green sideless tunnel of the firmament.
Ali-el-Kerbelaï paused and watched
Intent, even as by torchlight men spear fish,
While searching flame-reflections brushed and lit
The deep brown-watered caverns of his eyes,
Where dim shapes moved profoundly in the pool.
His listeners watched the sage in ecstasy
Poise, concentrate his massive thought on Nothing,
Heard his narghilé bubble like a brain....
"From Hind to Misr. At Cairo's El-Azhar,
The flower of Moslem scholarship, I sat
Among the Sunni bastards. As a cat
Watches the sun through eyelids scarce ajar,
From dawn till evening prayer I laboured hard,
Lolling in ambush round the great courtyard
"To pounce on wingèd words. Athwart the arcade
Midday in golden bars came clanging down
Upon the anvil of each turbaned crown,
And many minds took refuge in my shade.
I was divinely hard to understand,
Talking until my throat was dry as sand.
"So to the mosque well—into it they pushed
A dog who disagreed with me—and drew
Relief what time the pigeons ceased to coo
Or rustle round its rainbow-juice. We hushed
Our flights of eloquence when my roghan
Sizzled complacent in the frying-pan.
"Mashallah, what a life! Yet in this scene
I found a fleck of rust upon my tongue.
Propelled by Fate and my own force of lung,
I flitted with two reverend Maghrebín
Whom I had favoured, having learned the trick
Of speaking their foul breed of Arabic.
"Immortal spirits led us, yea the chief
Afrit, the crown of all the Afarit.
We crossed the great Sahara like a street.
My fame allows me licence to be brief.
Enough. Whatever any sceptic says,
I still maintain I spent a year at Fez.
"Here was a sect that said one God was three.
I plied Moriscos who had tasted two
Beliefs perforce, I even asked a Jew
To make this strange Tariqah clear; but he—
By this judge Christians—he could not explain,
Although his father had been burnt in Spain.
"Ah, how I studied in that narrow city,
Whose walls are changeless as a Persian law,
And full of loopholes. To the seers I saw
Is due the gamut of my human pity.
We stirred the puddles of the human mind
Till none could see the bottom but the blind.
"Now Shaitan tempted me. I fell for once,
A venial sin.... I journeyed to Stamboul
To plumb the errors of the Greegi school.
'Twas there I read the Stagyrite, a dunce,
The Frankish ruler of theology,
And father of a dunce, Alfarabi.
"I laid him low and hurried home to indite
A book, the fruit of all my Thought and Travel,
Entitled 'Contemplation of the Navel,'
A mystic book. (But first I learned to write.)
Such of our doctors as can read have read it.
But I was bent on even higher credit.
"I sought a cave whence madmen hunt wild sheep,
And there for thirteen years I held my head,
Until the dupes decided I was dead.
Indeed I spent the better part in sleep,
Lest I should be beguiled from abstract chatter
By lust for this world's striped and dazzling matter.
"Night brought me counsel, and a pock-marked Kurd
Or angels brought me food. Day spared my dreams
That tilled the solitude like slow white teams
Of oxen, till it blossomed, and I heard
The Roc's huge pinions scour the starry cobbles;
And so I rose above all human squabbles.
"For me the burning haze made sandhills dance,
Till blushing shadows covered their nude breasts.
The eternal heirs of leisure were my guests,
And feasted on my glory in advance.
Then on an eve among the eves.... The End!
My soul sat by me talking as a friend.
"I bleached my beard, and came to Ispahan.
You know the rest. To Allah's will I bowed
In suffering the plaudits of the crowd,
For all must listen; those must preach who can.
I stirred the town with fingers raised to bless....
And gauged the people by my emptiness."
The caravan was gone. Its song survived
A little, faint, an echo, not at all.
Then like a magic carpet warmth was drawn
Back into heaven, and left behind a void
Where thin-faced breezes, huddling from the hills,
Sat down to breathe hard tales upon their hands.
And suddenly earth looked her age. Like her
The shapes round Ali-el-Kerbelaï shivered,
Pulling their coloured abbas to their ears
And drawing in their feet. At last one spoke:
"O master, you to whom the world is known,
What is your thought's conclusion, what the sum
Of added knowledge in the tome of You?"
And Ali answered weighing out his words:
"Sir, I have seen the East and West, great peace,
Great wars, indifferent fates that blessed or cursed
Their builders. I have touched the best and worst
In flesh and thought, have watched flames rise and cease,
Consoled high hopes, deep passions, men that die
For things beneath the earth, behind the sky,
"For god or woman. I have counted change
For the Sarraf of Changelessness, have marked
Kings, Wazirs, coursed by sons of dogs that barked
And bit, the uninhabitable range
Of power, where all that climb in others' shoes
Are honoured and unperched like cockatoos.
"Now having known mankind in hell and bliss
Through thrice a generation, I have formed
From all the problems I besieged or stormed
One firm conviction, only one! 'Tis this:
The Faith, the Pomp, the Loves, the Lives of men
Outshine the firefly and outcrest the wren."
He added as he rose: "But God is great."
And bent, repassing through the city gate,
Lest he should bump his venerable pate.