Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/158

 over rupees, annas, and pice, out of Peshawar, and up through the defile of the Khybar Pass where, on every hill-top, behind every rock and tree, squatted diminutive Goorkha soldiers in rifle green, guarding the bottle-like entrance of Britain's eastern Dominion.

Afghanistan—the North—Central Asia!

With every mile of the jagged road, Hector felt that this remote northern land was claiming him, welcoming him, rising about him in a stony, enormous tide which was trying to wipe from his brain all memory of home, of England, of the rolling, yellow Sussex downs.

Through the velvety gloom of the nights, through the crass white sunlight of the days, through the gaunt shadows of the volcanic hills which flanked the road and which danced, exuberantly, like hobgoblins among the dwarf aloes and pines and acacias, through the rhythmic click-clacketty-click of their Mawari stallions' dainty feet, there sounded to him the clarion call of a greater, deeper, older duty, duty more compelling than the mere “chance” at a new life, a new career which he had longed for ever since that night when he had shouldered his first brother's guilt and disgrace, when he had been kicked from the company of decent men as a card-cheat.

His groping, subconscious mind seemed on the very threshold of one of those splendid moments when, suddenly, a great light flashes down the hidden, choked passages of the soul, and makes visible for a fleeting second the secret yearnings of past lives—lives dimly remembered.