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Two days afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, and was killed. So the problem of the village of Kheiban was solved, and if in the history of the crimes that have blackened the earth with wanton cruelty and made God to hide His face, there is any so atrocious a tale, I do not know it.
On the eighteenth of March, we sat in the verandah looking still over the blackened unlovely prospect, but now cheerfully and with hope; for the eastern sky was piled up range beyond range with the scarlet and purple splendour of cloud-land, and, as darkness gathered, we saw the lightning, not twinkling and glimmering harmlessly about the horizon, as it had been all the summer, but falling sheer in violet-coloured rivers behind the dark curtain of rain that hung from the black edge of a teeming thunder-cloud.
For a quarter of an hour the only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled with popoi, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach. Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the tentacles being devoured as one eats celery.
These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future history in the mirror of England's annals. They are quaking now with the impetuous emotions of local nationality. They are blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch independence of centuries agone.
When the madness and the folly are over, when the tender green is creeping in and out among the blackened ruins, it will be well for us to think of that dying Uhlan who had to put up with a French baby instead of his own; of that Belgian mother to whom the German youngsters were just "poor lads" with their clothes torn.
There was something agreeable in their countenances, though their flowing hair and painted faces and legs and bodies gave them an extravagantly savage appearance, increased by their teeth being blackened, and by the bead ornaments which they wore round their necks, ankles, and wrists. The men wore a long loose robe, and the women one of shorter dimensions.
Fire and subsequent storms had practically leveled the stand of trees between the spot where Lew stood and the summit. Here and there a blackened tree thrust its bare trunk upward, limbless, its top gone, a ragged, spectral, pitiful remnant of what had been a beautiful tree. But mostly the thick stand of young poles had been laid low even as a scythe levels a field of grain.
His boots, too, were dusty and scratched; how long was it since he had blackened them? A five-minute session with the shoe-shining outfit, heretofore despised as a useless nuisance, made them glisten as did the kitchen stove after that Saturday polishing task had been completed.
Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind and the gloom but backs. "It's finished. Let's go." Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she is affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me. We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter has blackened. When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets.
The cold gray light of early dawn had given place to saffron, and the first drowsy challenge from the henroost had been shrilly answered from far and near, when old man Jerry awoke from his nap in the chimney corner, and, finding himself chilled through all his old, rheumatic bones, bent over the dying embers, pushed together the blackened and half-burned "chunks," and blew them until they glowed.
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