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Updated: May 25, 2025
Realizing that without Rostom he would be in a position of helplessness that might be serious, the Irishman put his hands to his lips and called out with authority to the running figure of his frightened guide. He shouted to him to stop. "There is nothing to fear. Come back! Are you afraid of a gust of wind?"
"Natives, travelers like ourselves, or something else?" He spoke very low, as though aware that what had waked him still hovered close enough to overhear. "Why do you fear?" And Rostom looked up a moment from stooping over the rope. He stepped a little nearer, avoiding the animal's hoofs.
"The fifteenth of June," the German said. "The fifteenth of June, yes," said O'Malley very slowly, but with wonder and excitement in his heart. "That was the day that Rostom tried to run away the day I saw him come to me from the trees the day we started off together ... to the Garden...." He turned to his companion questioningly. For a moment the rush of memory was quite bewildering.
Some strange passion of the man was deeply stirred; he did not wish to offend his violent beliefs and turn it against himself in a stupid, scrambling fight. He lay and waited. He heard the muttering of the deep voice behind him in the darkness. Presently it ceased. Rostom came softly back to bed.
Rostom spoke little Russian, and O'Malley's knowledge of Georgian lay in a single phrase, "Look sharp!" but with the aid of French the man had learned from shooting-parties, he gathered that some one had approached during the night and camped, it seemed, not far away above them.
But these concerned the outer man and have no proper place in this strange record ... and by the middle of July he found himself once more in civilization. At Michaelevo he said good-bye to Rostom and took the train. And it was with the return to the conditions of modern life that the reaction set in and stirred the deeper layers of consciousness to reproduce their store of magic.
The animal instinctively had divined the presence of something to which it, too, was remotely kin. Rostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time apparently praying.
Packing up kit and dunnage, he crossed the Georgian Military Route on foot to Vladikavkaz, and thence with another horse and a Mohammedan Georgian as guide, Rostom by name, journeyed via Alighir and Oni up a side valley of unforgettable splendor toward an Imerethian hamlet where they meant to lay-in supplies for a prolonged expedition into the uninhabited wilderness.
Rostom, a man utterly careless of physical danger, rising to it, rather, with delight, was frightened in his soul. "What do you mean?" O'Malley asked louder, with an air of impatience assumed. The man was on his knees, but whether praying, or merely struggling with the rope, was hard to see. "What is it you're talking about so foolishly?" He spoke with a confidence he hardly felt himself.
For O'Malley had turned to Rostom with some word that here, in this figure, lay the explanation of the animal's excitement in the night, when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same direction as himself.
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