A Prince of Dreamers Part 61

True, it dazzles the eyes, but to look at it much would be to court blindness. Lo! it gives _me_ the browache. Come Ummu, let us on our way. I have promised Hamida, rhubarb-stew to her dinner and we must climb to the snows for that."

But Umm Kulsum lingered for consolation since, in truth, the stone bewildered her. "True, _chachaji_" (maternal uncle), she said softly, "I am not clever enough for it. There be so many sides, and each seemeth different."

Aye that was it! So many sides, thought Akbar, as, after dismissing the jeweller and his escort for refreshment, he sate on that pinnacle of rock almost overhanging the Panjab plain, and looked at the Luck which he had had cut in Western fas.h.i.+on.

His fowling piece--for he had been on his way to one of his long solitary rambles--lay beside him and on the polished steel of its lock the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne glinted, sending reflected light to touch and make visible the almost microscopic fruition of a tiny lichen on the rock.

But how much more brilliant was the light that sparkled from the diamond!

A hundred suns in one? No it was a hundred worlds--worlds unseen till then.

What would it--what might it not--what ought it not to make manifest?

So once more as he sate holding his luck in his hands, holding it between him and the river-damascened s.h.i.+eld of the wide Panjab plain, the Self that is behind Self found eyes and saw.

What did he see? Did he see the s.h.i.+eld of India stand in the forefront of battle for the principles he preached, as it did in Mutiny time? Or did sight pa.s.s beyond that, and did he see the East, intoxicated by the errors of the West, aping the horrors of a civilisation which has missed its way, which has forgotten that Socialism is Despotism--the Despotism of Fate whose eye is fixed, not on the equality of the individual, but the ultimate outcome of Race?

Who knows?

For as the morning sun rose to power, vapoury mist-clouds gathered on the damp mountain sides below, and crept up and up, hiding all things, obscuring all things.

The wide s.h.i.+eld of the Land of the Five Rivers went first. Bit by bit the hurrying mists obscured it, the damascening disappeared until high upon the sky only a clear blue curved rim remained--an arch of victory that stretched over the visible world.

Then the mist claimed Akbar's outstretched hand; so, rising, rolling over on itself, almost playing with the short flower-set turf, patched here and there with melting snow, and nestling into the crannies of the rock, it shrouded the King from his Kingdom, the Man from his World--and the Dreamer was alone with his Dream.

He was asleep, his head resting on a tuft of those tiny blue poppies which grow on the peaks of Holy Himalya--poppies of heavenly rest whose petals look as if they had been cut from the sky--when Aunt Rosebody's voice roused him. The sun, having overcome the mists, was s.h.i.+ning brightly.

"Lo!" she exclaimed, "the King hath been delayed no doubt, but high up where we were seeking rhubarb it was like the Day of Resurrection to see the mists tear themselves to shreds in rage as the Sun caught them. So goes Ignorance before Wisdom. And little Fair-face hath found his granddad a _nargiz_--present it, child, though 'tis late for a New Year offering. Lo! he is the spit of my father--on whom be peace--no flower escapes him."

"And I have found violets for the King," smiled Umm Kulsum, comfortably. She was more than ever a Mother of Plumpness in her stuffed Mogul costume.

"Ps'sh" commented Auntie Rosebody scornfully. "What are flowers to rhubarb? And I have enough for two stews, so Rakiya Begum may lay her tartness to that--if she will eat of it, though mayhap at her age she hath forgotten her youth. As for me, 'twill be a Day of Resurrection indeed to taste of it again, for I have dreamt of it all these years."

Akbar caught up the child with a sudden laugh, and setting him astride his shoulders began the descent to the camp below.

"'Tis as well, most reverend," he said "that some dreamers dream true."

Did he think as he spoke of a woman who had dreamed her dream through to the Truth, _whose hiding place is immortality, whose shadow is death?_

Perhaps he did. Perhaps, even now, on those misty spring mornings when the sun chases the snow vapours over the blue gentians and rosy alpine primulas that edge the snow patches on the peaks of the Pir Panjal, the Self that lay behind the Self that was called Akbar sits, enshrouded by the mists and looks out over the Empire of the Great Mogul.

What does the Prince of Dreamers think of it?

F. A. Steel.

_28th January, 1908_.