Tales of Three Hemispheres | Page 5

close in the twilight, and the office of
postman fell vacant in Otford-under-the-Wold.

THE PRAYER OF BOOB AHEERA
In the harbour, between the liner and the palms, as the huge ship's
passengers came up from dinner, at moonrise, each in his canoe, Ali
Kareeb Ahash and Boob Aheera passed within knife thrust.
So urgent was the purpose of Ali Kareeb Ahash that he did not lean
over as his enemy slid by, did not tarry then to settle that long account;
but that Boob Aheera made no attempt to reach him was a source of

wonder to Ali. He pondered it till the liner's electric lights shone far
away behind him with one blaze and the canoe was near to his
destination, and pondered it in vain, for all that the eastern subtlety of
his mind was able to tell him clearly was that it was not like Boob
Aheera to pass him like that.
That Boob Aheera could have dared to lay such a cause as his before
the Diamond Idol Ali had not conceived, yet as he drew near to the
golden shrine in the palms, that none that come by the great ships ever
found, he began to see more clearly in his mind that this was where
Boob had gone on that hot night. And when he beached his canoe his
fears departed, giving place to the resignation with which he always
viewed Destiny; for there on the white sea sand were the tracks of
another canoe, the edges all fresh and ragged. Boob Aheera had been
before him. Ali did not blame himself for being late, the thing had been
planned before the beginning of time, by gods that knew their business;
only his hate of Boob Aheera increased, his enemy against whom he
had come to pray. And the more his hate increased the more clearly he
saw him, until nothing else could be seen by the eye of his mind but the
dark lean figure, the little lean legs, the grey beard and neat loin-cloth
of Boob Aheera, his enemy.
That the Diamond Idol should have granted the prayers of such a one
he did not as yet imagine, he hated him merely for his
presumptuousness in approaching the shrine at all, for approaching it
before him whose cause was righteous, for many an old past wrong, but
most of all for the expression of his face and the general look of the
man as he has swept by in his canoe with his double paddle going in
the moonlight.
Ali pushed through the steaming vegetation. The place smelt of orchids.
There is no track to the shrine though many go. If there were a track the
white man would one day find it, and parties would row to see it
whenever a liner came in; and photographs would appear in weekly
papers with accounts of it underneath by men who had never left
London, and all the mystery would be gone away and there would be
nothing novel in this story.

Ali had scarcely gone a hundred yards through cactus and creeper
underneath the palms when he came to the golden shrine that nothing
guards except the deeps of the forest, and found the Diamond Idol. The
Diamond Idol is five inches high and its base a good inch square, and it
has a greater lustre than those diamonds that Mr. Moses bought last
year for his wife, when he offered her an earldom or the diamonds, and
Jael his wife had answered, "Buy the diamonds and be just plain Mr.
Fortescue."
Purer than those was its luster and carved as they carve not in Europe,
and the men thereby are poor and held to be fearless--yet they do not
sell that idol. And I may say here that if any one of my readers should
ever come by ship to the winding harbour where the forts of the
Portuguese crumble in infinite greenery, where the baobab stands like a
corpse here and there in the palms, if he goes ashore where no one has
any business to go, and where no one so far as I know has gone from a
liner before (though it's little more than a mile or so from the pier), and
if he finds a golden shrine, which is near enough to the shore, and a
five-inch diamond in it carved in the shape of a god, it is better to leave
it alone and get back safe to the ship than to sell that diamond idol for
any price in the world.
Ali Kareeb Ahash went into the golden shrine, and when he raised his
head from the seven obeisances that are the due of the idol, behold! it
glowed with such a lustre as only