the holy man, motionless, gaunt, his eyes filled with the peace of allah, the one and only god, stood afar off, outlined against the blazing sky.

he looked to the north, where had passed a party of bedouins with a white man and a white woman in their midst—a white woman with eyes like stars of happiness and hair like unto a golden flower.

he looked to the east, where passed a body of men, driving their horses at greatest speed as they rode silently, swiftly, into the unknown, with the lance at rest.

leaderless they rode, a black line across the limitless, relentless desert, their spear points glittering in the sun.

they faded into the distance, they were gone.

to the south lay the holy man’s path, the south where the wind blows hottest, where the sands burn the sandal from off even holy feet, which search salvation in distress throughout the years.

“and deliver them from evil.”

he leant upon his staff, older by some score years than when he stood to watch two horsemen fleeing for their lives across the desert. the beads of mecca slipped between his fingers as he bent to read the inscription from the korān which the patriarch had roughly scratched with spear point upon the sand.

he lifted up his voice in the wilderness above the spot where zarah the arabian, wrapped in her great white cloak, lay upon al-asad’s heart, asleep beneath the sands of the desert to which they both belonged:

“for whomsoever thou shalt deliver from evil on that day on him wilt thou have mercy; and this will be great salvation.”

[320]

the wind from the south carried the sonorous word from the korān up to heaven as the holy man passed on the one solitary figure moving in the relentless desert, the forcing-ground of hate and fear and revenge, the burial place of love and hope and peace, above which the birds of prey wheeled and called as they drifted to the north and the south, the east and the west, as they have drifted since the day every grain of sand was numbered.