United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Already they are trading in the principal towns, and in Arochuku a Mullah is sitting, smiling and expectant, and ingratiating himself with the people. Here the position should be strengthened; it is, as Miss Slessor knew, the master-key to the Ibo territory, for if the Aros are Christianised, they will carry the evangel with them over a wide tract of country.
Before any such action could be taken, news was brought that the Ameer had caused the arrest of forty important tribesmen, who were supposed to have assisted the mad Mullah in rousing the people against the British. This action has had such an excellent effect on the tribes that many people suppose Great Britain's frontier war is over.
There is no war between us now, and the Mullah will kill me for not seeing you pass!" "Rest easy," said Halley; "we are coming to kill the Mullah, if God please. His teeth have grown too long. No harm will come to thee unless the daylight shows thee as a face which is desired by the gallows for crime done. But what of the dead regiment?"
"You don't seriously mean, Basil," I said, "that you think that that fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad Mullah and " "He has one fault," said Basil thoughtfully, "or virtue, as you may happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style; he is too veracious."
Yet the Afridi could not be got to say a word. Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the baggage. But King's men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing. "Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim!
There were men in it, ten or eleven of them, all armed, squatting round the fire. "Get out!" growled the mullah. But they did not obey. They sat and stared at him. "Have ye tents?" the mullah asked, in a voice like thunder. "Aye!" But they did not go yet.
After a while the mullah went and carried a great water bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he heaped great fagots on the fire wasteful fagots, each of which had cost some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King's soap.
So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look more scared than ever. "Who paid the price of thy admission?" the mullah howled, and King cleared his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean. "Speak, Kurram Khan!" Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest. "Tell them whom you slew."
Khoda Dad Khan pocketed that insult. He had learned something that he much wanted to know, and returned to his hills to be sarcastically complimented by the Mullah, whose tongue raging round the camp-fires was deadlier flame than ever dung-cake fed. Be pleased to consider here for a moment the unknown district of Kot- Kumharsen.
They tossed him over the cliff, too startled to scream an alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and shouted, they were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of dead men before the mullah even knew what was happening.
Word Of The Day