  Light was not. All was still. The caravan Had ceased its song and motion by the bed Wherein the hill-stream tosses sleeplessly, The only sound, save one staccato note Interminably piped by tiny owls. The camp lay balmed in slumber, as the dead Are straitened in white trappings. Then a voice, Deeper than any dead black mountain pool Or blacker well where devils cool by day, Seemed to commune with Dreamer-of-the-Age, Who, peering through the cloak about his head, Challenged: "Who speaks?" The voice replied: "A friend Unknown to you." ... It was old Peacock Tous, The great grey camel with the crimson tail On whom the queen was wont to ride. He said: "Sheikh, I was born among the Bakhtiari, The shelter of their hawthorn vales was mine; For me, unbroken to the loads men carry, The breeze that crowns their uplands glowed as wine To drink. I, Tous, the Peacock, whom men call so Because I ever moved as one above The common herd, was mad and merry. Also I knew not yet the prickled herb of Love. "Spring tricked the desert out with flowered patterns For me to tread like flowered carpets wrought In patience by my master's painted slatterns— He said that only Persian women fought. Ah, youth is free and silken-haired and leggy! No camel knows why Allah makes it end, But He is wiser. Me the tribe's Il-Beggi Spied out and sent as tribute to a friend, "A dweller in black tents, a nomad chieftain Of Khamseh Arabs or unruled Kashgai, Whose cattle-raids and rapines past belief stain The furthest page of camel-history. And shamefully the ragged sutlers thwacked us, Until I learned, as to this manner born, That pride must find a mother in the cactus And hope the milk of kindness in the thorn. "O Sheikh, I found. A milk-white nakeh followed The drove of males, and I would lag behind With her, no matter how the drivers holloa'ed— Man never doubts that all but he are blind. At nightfall, when our champing echoed surly Beyond the cheerful circle of the fire, Something within me whispered, and thus early I bore the burden of the world's desire. "But I was saddled with the will of Allah, Since one there was more fleet of foot than I, The chosen of the chief of the Mehallah, Whose nostrils quivered as he passed me by. To her, beside his paces and his frothing, My steadfastness was common as the air, My passion and my patience were as nothing, Because fate chose to make my rival fair. "I suffered and was silent—some said lazy— Until the seasons drove us to the plain. The nomads sold me then to a Shirazi. I never met my happiness again, But trod the same old measure back and forward, And passed a friend as seldom as a tree. Oh, heaviness of ever going shoreward, Of bringing all fruition to the sea! "For I have fared from sea to sea like you, sirs, And with your like, not once but many times. Your path acclaims me eldest of its users, It tells my step as I foresee your rhymes. I know by heart a heartache's thousandth chapter As you have read the preface of delight. The silence you shall enter, I have mapped her. O singing caravan, I was To-night "Long ere you dreamed. I dreaming of my lady Became the cargo-bearer we call Self. Two hundredweight of flesh that spouted Sa'di, A restless bag of bones intent on pelf, Have straddled me in turn.... Hashish and spices, Wheat, poisons, satins, brass, and graven stone, I, Tous, have borne all human needs and vices As solemnly as had they been my own. "Moon-faced sultanas blue with kohl a-pillion, Grey ambergris, pink damask-roses' oil, Deep murex purple, beards or lips vermilion As Abu Musa's flaming scarlet soil I have borne—and dung and lacquer. I have flooded Bazaars with poppy-seed and filigree. Men little guess the stuff that I have studied, Or what their vaunted traffic seems to me. "I am hardened to all wonderments and stories— My ears have borne the hardest of my task— I have carried pearls from Lingah up to Tauris, And Russian Jews from Lenkoran to Jask. I have watched fat vessels crammed by sweating coolies With all the rubbish that the rich devise, And often I have wondered who the fool is That takes it all, and whom the fool supplies. "Yet ran my thoughts on her, though cedar rafters Were laid on me, or mottled silk and plush, Although the tinkling scales of varied laughters Rode me from Bandar Abbas to Barfrush, Or broken hearts from Astara to Gwetter. All ironies have made their moving house Of me. I smile to think how many a letter Has passed from loved to lover thanks to Tous "The loveless. Think you men alone are lonely, My masters? I have also worshipped one, Have built my days of faith and service only, And while I worshipped all my life was gone. I spent the funds of life in growing older, In heaping fuel on a smothered fire. See how my tale is rounded! On my shoulder I bear the burden of your world's desire. "Yet keep that inner smile; and never show it Though the Account be nothing—shorn of her. Be wise, O Sheikh. Pray God to be a poet Lest life |
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