Page:A child of the Orient (IA childoforient00vakarich).pdf/62

 Son, if He had lived, would have been almost nineteen hundred years old."

She turned abruptly, and her face in the little hollow was very near mine.

"What son?" she inquired with interest.

"Jesus Christ, our Lord," I answered.

"Your prophet? Why, He wasn't His Son. Allah never married," and again the words flashed into my mind that there was neither giving nor taking in marriage in heaven. Yet I stood by my orthodoxy.

"Christ is the Son of God," I maintained.

Djimlah, too, stood by her belief. "Allah had no children of the flesh. Christ was only a prophet—and He was second to Mohammed."

A brilliant idea came to me. "You know, Djimlah," I explained, "I am not talking of Allah, I am talking of God."

"They are all the same," she asserted. "There is but one Heaven and one Earth, and one Sun and one Moon. Therefore there is but one God, and that is Allah, and we are His children."

I was staggered by her confident tone. Djimlah with her words had made of me a Mohammedan and an infidel—something religiously unclean and unspeakable. And, what is more, she was unconscious of the enormity of her speech: she was excitedly watching the lightning, now making all sorts of arabesques on the sky.

"Watch, darling, watch!" she cried. "I