Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/136

 bloated and useless thing, my life a blackened crucible—but the blade flashed free, and I heard the muffled, sobbing drums of victory!”

“Rather neatly turned, that!” he said to himself, with a fleeting recurrence to his disturbing, saturnine mood, while Mehmet Iddrissy Khan raised lean, brown hands.

“Praise Allah!” he said, sonorously. “Praised be Allah, the Just, the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the King of the Day of Judgment, the Holder of the Scales of Mercy and of Wisdom with the Strength of His Hands, the Opener of the Locks of Souls with the golden Keys of His Understanding!”—and, in that typically Oriental way which so distresses Europeans and which permits its possessor to pass rapidly, without jarring break and without the slightest feeling of ludicrousness or self-consciousness, from a gorgeously epic or religious height to the level, drab plane of constructive, logically reasoning practicability:

“Time presses, saheb. When wilt thou be ready to start for the North, for Central Asia?”

“To-night,” replied Hector, “this very minute,” thinking with bitter satisfaction that there was nothing West of the Howrah Bridge or East of Fort William to keep him in Calcutta except—yes!—he added in his mind, then with the spoken word:

“Passport! What about a passport? I talked to Rivet-Carnac to-day and …”

“Insh'allah!” Mehmet Iddrissy Khan cut through the sentence with a wagging, derisive thumb on which twinkled a great star sapphire.