FROM THE MASJID-AL-AQSA OF SAYYID AHMED (WAHABI)
Not with an outcry to Allah nor any complaining
He answered his name at the muster and
stood to the chaining.
When the twin anklets were nipped on the
leg-bars that held them,
He brotherly greeted the armourers stooping
to weld them.
Ere the sad dust of the marshalled feet
of the chain-gang swallowed him,
Observing him nobly at ease, I alighted
and followed him.
Thus we had speech by the way, but not
touching his sorrow
Rather his red Yesterday and his regal
To-morrow,
Wherein he statelily moved to the clink
of his chains unregarded,
Nowise abashed but contented to drink
of the potion awarded.
Saluting aloofly his Fate, he made swift
with his story;
And the words of his mouth were as slaves
spreading carpets of glory
Embroidered with names of the Djinns—a
miraculous weaving—
But the cool and perspicuous eye overbore
unbelieving.
So I submitted myself to the limits of
rapture—
Bound by this man we had bound, amid captives
his capture—
Till he returned me to earth and the visions
departed;
But on him be the Peace and the Blessing:
for he was great-hearted!
“He that believeth shall not make haste.”—Isaiah.
The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool,
her crew idly spanking the water with the flat of
their oars. A red-coated militia-man, rifle in
hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern.
Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped,
honey-coloured rocks on the beach the green water
was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing.
Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light
poles rose those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat
on Simonstown. Beneath them the little Barracouta
nodded to the big Gibraltar, and the old Penelope,
that in ten years has been bachelors’ club, natural
history museum, kindergarten, and prison, rooted and
dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a three-funnelled
Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled
in from the deep sea.
Said the sentry, assured of the visitor’s good
faith, “Talk to ’em? You can, to
any that speak English. You’ll find a lot
that do.”
Here and there earnest groups gathered round ministers
of the Dutch Reformed Church, who doubtless preached
conciliation, but the majority preferred their bath.
The God who Looks after Small Things had caused the
visitor that day to receive two weeks’ delayed
mails in one from a casual postman, and the whole
heavy bundle of newspapers, tied with a strap, he
dangled as bait. At the edge of the beach, cross-legged,
undressed to his sky-blue army shirt, sat a lean,
ginger-haired man, on guard over a dozen heaps of
clothing. His eyes followed the incoming Atlantic
boat.
