Page:The Best continental short stories of and the yearbook of the continental short story 1924-25.pdf/72

 Ethiopia. Who will ever untangle its mysteries, that tongue so full of gossip and chatter, that speech which so jealously guards all it knows of our remote ancestry and which bestows upon humanity a heritage which must be preserved in divine silence?

Who can tell us the meaning of the outline of a ram, with a sun hanging at its neck, carved upon the ancient rocks? What did the sign of the carven buffalo convey? Scattered are now the graves of Itherene, whose name it were better not to speak aloud, but to whisper only with a tongue weighted with grains of wheat, for men must ever dread the divine curse hanging over him who traffics in blood. That divine malediction still persists, even though the pillared tombs of the Itherenians have vanished, even if that blond-haired, blue-eyed race have been absorbed into the mists of the past. That was a lofty race of hunters, whose prayers arose to Itherter, the Buffalo. That was a race foredoomed to death, living without prosperity and knowing no promised future.

The Kabyle hovels are now roofed with French tiles, and their roofs no longer the ancient inscriptions which could have borne witness had they been respected. These inscriptions no longer exist, even at Terroual, where the houses hide jealously Baerk, the secret of buried wealth which drives men underground. For such relics, one must go as far as the country of the Ait Bou Mahdi. Here, in the foundations of the dwellings, one may learn of a rich patrimony of secret history, establishing the existence, anciently, of a race living beneath the surface of the earth and coming out from their habitation when the world was created. This noble race emerged from the soil as did the ancient Buffalo, the great ancestor of those numberless animals which have fallen beneath the spears of the ancient, audacious hunters. So also did the mythological Sun-Ram rise from the dust, the Ram who ripens the nourishing grain and the fruitful crops, and whom, at a later time, the Egyptians well remembered in their representations of Amman, their sun god, whose head was the head of a ram.

Loudly, powerfully, speaks the voice of Fame! En-