Persian dawns, Egyptian nights

28
PERSIAN DAWNS
Ormuz with pearls and sandalwood and outrageous
travellers’ tales, the quarters of the Persian poets,
the kennels of the Somali dervish-troupes. At
night the drowsy mullah would start at sight of that
wanderer on the floor of his mosque, some ghaffir
shrink into his doorway at sight of that beaked,
thin nose and sardonic, searching eyes. The heretic
General had abandoned his palace roof and gone
out into the world in quest of the lost constituent.
If neither in blood nor bones, drugs nor scents
nor sunshine lay the secret towards which he
had struggled by so many roads, might not. the
ultimate bridge to it, this last evanescent ingredient,
abide in some creed or phrase or stanza, all unwitting
its own power ?
But neither in fable nor fantasy, incantation nor
dogma, the droning of the mullahs or the screamed
revelations of epileptic dervishes could he find a
clue. Nor by purchase of Christian scripts and long
poring over the forgotten creed of his childhood
did he find it. For, as Nerses sententiously points
out, he sought not life eternal but youth on earth.
His was the quest not of the humble heart but the
golden grain—to recapture the years of the slave-
boy in Citadel and with that as beginning upbuild
a life full, perfect, unhaunted by a mysterious weari¬
ness and frustration.
And then a dreadful fear came on him and all one
night he tramped the palace roof-spaces in agony—
albeit a questioning, sardonic agony still. How if
the lost constituents of the life-essence he sought