Page:Marion Crawford - Khaled.djvu/250

 him yet being wounded in that sensitive tissue of the heart which divides the outer desert of pride from the inner garden of love, belonging to neither but separating the two as a veil. And when there is a rent in that veil, pride looks on love and scoffs bitterly, and love looks on pride and weeps tears of fire.

'I am sorry that you hate me,' she said, but the words were bitter in her mouth as a draught from a spring into which the enemy have cast wormwood, that none may drink of it.

'Allah is great!' thought Khaled. 'This is already an advantage.'

Then Zehowah took up the barbat and began to sing a careless song not like any which Khaled had ever heard. This is the song—

'The fisherman of Oman tied the halter under his arms, The sky was as blue as the sea in winter. The fisherman dived into the deep waters As a ray of light shoots through a sapphire of price. The sea was as blue as the sky, for it was winter. Among the rooks below the water it was dark and cold Though the sky above was as blue as a fine sapphire. The fisherman saw a rough shell lying there in the dark between two crabs, "In that shell there must be a large pearl," he said. But when he would have taken it the crabs ran together and fastened upon his hand. His heart was bursting in his ribs for lack of breath And he thought of the sky above, as blue as the sea in winter.