The utter monotony of a long seavoyage to one unaccustomed to travel spins out the days in such interminable wise that at the end of a fortnight one is tempted to believe that more than half of life has been passed in the belly of a ship. All the events of our normal existence become faint and shadowy memories-things that belong to some half-forgotten, unreal, former state of being; things that have little practical value or significance. The an alien faith. From time to time of dear ones who are dead and gone. some unfamilar port was touched at,-the blinding, burnt-brick mound of Aden, unsoftened by so much as a single blade of grass, and peopied by naked negroes who resembled Jins; the white-hot sand-sweeps of Suez, where blue-clad Arabs, with scarred faces, lived among strange beasts of burden, the like of which Saleh had never seen -camels and asses; and later still the European seaport towns, with their deafening roar of traffic and steamcranes, where white men dwelt in numbers past all counting. These new lands terrified Saleh, and caused him to feel outcast beyond redemption; for every step of the way, every turn of the churning screw, bore him farther and farther from the folk he loved, and the only corner of the earth that was dear to him. It seemed to him that he was the merest atom, a thing infinitely minute, lost past all recovery in limitless space. A sense of that awful vastness-which somehow was interwoven with a sudden perception of the real meaning of eternity-came upon the boy, shaking him with an abject terror. The idea, to his unaccustomed mind, was so immense that the sheer effort required to assimilate it set his brain reeling, tottering. And constantly the haunting question obtruded itself, "How shall I ever find a way back again across this' uncharted wilderness?" At that thought a cold despair would seize him, and he would fall to prowling about the ship like a caged beast, his eyes wearing a hunted look, while he endured agonies that were doubly bitter because he had no one in whom to confide his fears. So. when the night came, he would sob himself to sleep, and tossing restlessly upon his mattress when forgetfulness at last had come, would call by name upon his mother and upon others whom he loved, as men in heavy grief murmur in dreams the names world is narrowed down to the limits of the ship, its inhabitants to the number of the men and women who journey in her. There seems to be no special reason why anything should occur to break the dead sameness of the days: it would appear to be quite natural were the voyage to continue to the end of time interminable in its dull routine, its regularity, its idleness. And this, too, was Saleh's experience. With the passing of the third week his native land became something incredibly remote: the men and women who dwelt there little more than moving shadowshapes that came and went vaguely amidst the haze of memory. The natural adaptability of the boy, and, it may be, something of the innate philosophy and patience of the Malay and the Muhammadan, came to his rescue. He had settled down insensibly into the life of the ship so completely that he might have been a part of her; and though the present manner of his existence brought him no active happiness, he had found contentment of a dull vegetable sort that had in it nothing of irritation, expectation, or hope. He was picking up a little English too, -learning it as a child learns, unconsciously and without effort,--and he had all a child's delight in making display of his new acquirement. He had grown almost callous to the awful conception of the immensity of God's universe. to the humiliating sense of his own insignificance. These facts had lost their power to terrify and appal. Nor did it now seem to him to matter greatly if, after all, the land of his birth and all that it held had sunk beneath the skyline past the possibility of re-discovery. People were kind to him, and the inertia of his race caused him to shrink from the thought of the huge expenditure of energy which a return to the Malay Peninsula would entail. The conviction was upon him that he could never again bring himself to undertake another voyage like that which he was now making, yet this no longer filled him with terror or with despair. He had reached the condition which in his own tongue is called kaleh-a state of blank torpor and indifference, incomprehensible to the average European, that, holding all things of little worth, lulls the senses as with opium fumes. Wherefore it came to pass that the end of his journey found Saleh with roots firmly fixed in the life of the ship, parting from it and from the new friends whom he had made with intense discontent; but it found him also weaned already from his own people, for whom in the beginning he had sorrowed so grievously. IV. Saleh's first impressions of the white man's country remained later in his mind as a confused and fearful memory. The size, the dingy ugliness, the noise, the hurry of London combined to awe him; the great towering buildings, blackened with smoke, the blurred jumble of their roofs and chimneystacks half merged in the gray mirk, stood around him in serried ranks, bemming him in, stifling him; the colorless sodden sky, lowering above them, seemed to bear him to the ground through its sheer weight; the danger of instant annihilation, with which at every crossing of the streets the mighty traffic threatened him, set him shaking with an ague of terror; but most of all the frightful isolation, of which the seas of strange faces made him conscious, clutched at his heart-strings with a grip that was chill and paralyzing. The immensity of the universe had cowed him once: now it was the glimpse he had gotten of the unsuspected multitude of humanityunnumbered folk who had no thought or care for him-that robbed him of breath. He had never yet felt so utterly lost as now with these packed streams of unknown men and women drifting past him. All his days he had been an object of consideration, the son of a king, with willing subjects ready at his beck and call. He had never walked a yard without a tail of idle pages trailing after him. Now he believed himself to be drowning in an ocean of human beings, yet overwhelmed by an appalling solitude. A drive in a hansom through the throng of vehicles set his heart in his mouth, his hand clutching vainly at the arm of the man who sat beside him; the fearful speed of trains that rushed along the labyrinths of lines kept him in momentary expectation of catastrophe; but worse still were the crowds of Europeans that stared at and jostled him in the streets-men of an alien race, of pallid unnatural color, with intent busy faces, and hard eyes. Saleh felt much as a white child might feel who was suddenly set down in the midst of vast mobs of gibbering ne groes. He was convinced that the blended horror and fear with which his strange surroundings inspired him would last forever; that he could never become used to an environment so dreadful, so appalling; and all the while his very soul was aching with longing for the soft moist climate, the sunshine, and the lavish greenery of the Malayan land. The bitter nostalgia revived with all its ancient force, but his craving now was for inanimate rather than for animate things-for the familiar places in which his days had been passed, not for the men and women, his friends and kindred, who had already become mere shadowphantoms to his memory. And still his every suffering was made doubly hard because it was endured in secret and in silence. After a busy week in London Saleh was sent to Winchester, where a home bad been found for him in an English family. This severed the very last link that still connected him with the old life, for the officer who had brought him to England left him on the platform at Waterloo, after handing him over to the charge of a magnificentlooking personage, who, the boy thought, must surely be one of the great ones of the earth. He was surprised when this brass-bound potentate pocketed five shillings with apparent satisfaction, and addressed him as "Sir"; but in this strange land everything was puzzling and Saleh despaired of ever getting a grip upon the bewildering customs of the white men. He would have resisted this sudden transfer of himself from the care of a man whom he knew to that of a total stranger, but he was past the power of resistance or protest. He was completely cowed, as a young horse is cowed by an alien environment, and with the innate fatalism of his people he set himself to endure all that might befall with patience and philosophy, which only added to his trouble, since it drove it inward, denying it the relief of expression. At Winchester the boy was passed on to an immensely tall, upright, gravefaced clergyman, whose stiff black clothes and gaunt, clean-shaven face depressed the lad with gloomy forebodings. It was as though this man were an ogre-the grim custodian of the prison in which he was to be pent. All the passionate love of personal liberty, bred of the free life in the forest lived by uncounted generations of his forebears, awoke in Saleh, filling him with resentment against all the world, with savage impotent rage, with the instinct of fight, with a sullen desire to hurt some one, any one, because he himself was quivering with despair and fear and pain. When the clergyman held a hand towards him, the boy shrank back, his gums bared for the moment in something like a snarl, his whole body tingling with blended anger and terror, his muscles braced for flight or for self-defence. His new friend, looking down upon him through grave, preoccupied eyes, noted nothing of the lad's discomfiture, and as he shook him by the hand, patted him on the back, and gave him kindly welcome, he was happily unconscious of the fact that the little brown creature before him was longing for a dagger with which to stab! Next, after a short drive in a cab, from the windows of which Saleh saw the effigy of a big black swan, that he decided must be some unclean idol of the white folk, he found himself standing very ill at ease just within the doorway of an English drawing-room. It was the first place of the kind that he had ever seen, and its smallness, its strangely low ceiling, the quantity of furniture, the endless knicknacks and ornament, seemed to him to be things unnatural, barbarous, stifling. He felt as a wild thing may do when it finds itself in a trap. The narrowness of the confined space set him gasping: he looked about him with furtive eyes, seeking some means of escape. The room seemed to him to be packed with people, for Mrs. Le Mesurier, the clergyman's wife, was seated beside a tea-table with her family about her. There were three girls with their hair down their backs, and a boy, all of whom stared at the stranger with eyes made round by curiosity. Mrs. Le Mesurier rose from her chair and came towards him, holding out both her hands in greeting. Saleh noticed that she moved as no Malayan woman ever yet moved, with a graceful sweeping carriage that had still the spring of youth in it, and that her eyes were soft and kind. Her thick dark hair fell low upon a broad forehead, parting in two glossy waves; her cheeks had a delicate tinge of pink, that seemed a blemish in Saleh's eyes, for he was accustomed to the even pallor of his own womenkind. Just as at Colombo it had been the dissimilarities rather than the resemblances that had arrested his attention, so now it was the point in which Mrs. Le Mesurier failed to conform to the standard set by her sisters in Malaya that at first struck Saleh's eye: yet as she came towards him she appeared to him to be a figure vaguely, elusively familiar, like something seen for an instant in a state of previous existence fitfully remembered. The little feet so daintily shod, the pretty undulating gait, the gentle frou-frow of her garments as she moved, the soft delicate hands with their pink palms and slender nervous Blackwood's Magazine. fingers, outstretched in greeting, the thoughtful eyes whose gaze was bent upon him, all were quite foreign to his experience of women-of the women whom he had known; and yet and yet, there exhaled from her a subtle air of femininity, of tenderness, of he knew not what, that reminded him irresistibly of his mother. No two human beings could be more unlike, wider apart, could differ more completely in their habit of thought, outlook upon life, in mental grasp, in opinion or in sympathy, in all things they resembled one another as little as did their outer seeming, yet to Saleh they were strangely, indescribably alike; for, though he knew it not, it was the maternity which these women shared in common that forged between them a subtle link that made them akin. He did not reason or speculate about it then or later, but he was conscious of it, felt it in the very marrow of his bones, and as his hands met her warm clasp his misery was tempered for him suddenly, and something of peace was restored to him. Thenceforth, I think, Saleh was a little less lonely and outcast in the heart of this strange world into which he had been thrust so ruthlessly. (To be continued.) MODERNISM IN ISLAM. There is in every gathering of many creeds and races a certain appeal to the imagination. A café in Vienna, where every hat conceals a different nationalist fanaticism, is not without its romance. A Turkish ferry-boat on the Bosphorus, its deck an epitome of the whole ethnography of Asia, sets one dreaming of Charon's bark, where for the first time all the tribes of mankind met on the common road to Hades. The streets of Cairo provide the same They fascination with a difference. tell of the wistful patriotism of the exile, and even their signboards flaunt a polyglot home-sickness. The "Café of Zion" stands side by side with the "Restaurant of Ararat," and across the way the "Bakery of Macedonia" breathes insanitary aspirations after freedom. But it is in the ancient university of El Azhar that the East has gathered its motleyest concourse. There is, to be sure, no contrast of the green turban that marks his descent from the Prophet, resplendent in hereditary embroideries, and wearing in his sash a great dagger with a golden hilt, the ransom of a whole caravan of slaves, the price of a herd of camels. A man of affairs, accustomed to treat with Pashas and spies from Yildiz Palace, he has come on legal business to Cairo. He tells us with what satisfaction the citizens of Mecca and Medina watch the approach of the Sultan's railroad from Damascus; how they count their gains from the coming influx of pilgrims; while the Bedouin of the Desert wonders whether a train will be as easy to blackmail as a caravan. We ask him, as a doctor in Islam, whether it is really quite orthodox to ignore the Prophet's injunction garbs and costumes. The students wear the same decent robes of striped silk, and the same modest turbans of white or green. Arabic, too, is their common tongue, and the thoughts in their carefully disciplined brains are more uniform than those of a crowd of true-born Englishmen or Germans. But they have come from every corner of the Mohammedan world. There are men of Turkish stock from the Crimea and from Turkestan, Tartars of the Caucasus, Afghans, Malays, and Indians, Arabs from Morocco, and Arabised negroes from Uganda or Nigeria. They mingle with the throng of Egyptian peasant students, and only a shade of duskiness or the curve of a nose marks the difference among them. They are all quartered round the great open courtyard of the mosque, squat--that the pilgrimage must be made ting in little groups, with a praying mat, an earthern pitcher, and a heap of dried maize cakes for their only property. They sit or kneel through the long hours of daylight, now listening to the lectures of their doctors, now swaying to and fro, hardly pausing to regard the stranger, in their effort to commit the Koran to memory. But under the external sameness a world of jarring politics and strivings lies hidden. Here are the "Mad Mullahs" of to-morrow, who will preach a jehad to Afridi clansmen on the Indian frontier, or rouse the Somalis to arms. compare notes, when the Koran is laid aside at sundown, and discuss the varying ways of Anglo-Indian magistrates and French officials, Dutch governors, and Russian bureaucrats? Do they realize as one problem the secular struggle of East and West? Do they catch a glimpse of the long line of the eddying skirmish, of which each newcomer could relate an episode from his own remote experience? Do they We meet, as we walk among them, an old acquaintance, a Sheikh from Mecca, a tall, burly Arab, glorious in oxen. either on foot or on camel-back. He smiles an easy deprecation of the question; the pilgrimage is to him a matter of business. We quit him, to step warily among the busy fellaheen, who memorize the Koran with the same stolid industry with which they would follow the slow steps of their ploughWe brush, as we go, against a tall young African, black as ebony, but with Arab features. He has just arrived from Bornu, on the edge of the Sahara. A fellow student lays a hand on his arm, to see what book it is that he is carrying. The freshman turns angrily round, shouting, gesticulating, and even threatening to draw his knife. "He has only just come to the Azhar," a sophisticated Egyptian student explains, "he thinks we all want to rob him." One's brain reels at the thought of the mental processes which will go on in the head of the poor, puzzled Bornese during his three years in Cairo, as he learns, with the memory of the desert behind him, to thread his way among electric tramears and automobiles, turns from the Koran to the daily Arabic press, jostles with Euro |