Then--as one looking upon
pictures but partially intelligible to her, and commenting on them as
a girl who had never seen or known the passions and the mutual enmity
of men--she startled me by breaking into the kind of chant in which
the peculiar verse of her language is commonly delivered. My own
thought of the moment was not her guide. The Moslem battle-cry had
rung too often in my ears ever to be forgotten; but up to that moment
I had never recalled to memory the words in which on my last field I
retorted upon my Arab comrades, when flinching from a third charge
against those terrible "sons of Eblis," whose stubborn courage had
already twice hurled us back in confusion and disgrace with a hundred
empty saddles. At first her tone was one of simple amaze and horror.
It softened afterwards into wonder and perplexity, and the
oft-repeated rebuke or curse was on its last recurrence spoken with
more of pitying tenderness and regret than of severity:--
"What! those are human bosoms whereon the brute hath trod!
What! through the storm of slaughter rings the appeal to God!
Through the smoke and flash of battle a single form is shown;
O'er clang and crash and rattle peals out one trumpet-tone--
'Strike, for Allah and the Prophet! let Eblis take his own!'
"Strange! the soul that, fresh from carnage, quailed not alone to face
The unfathomed depths of Darkness, the solitudes of Space!
Strange! the smile of scorn, while nerveless dropped the sword-arm from
the sting,
On the death that scowled at distance, on the closing murder-ring.
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