left waving the 'chamar' as diamonds flashed from their bracelets, the Badshah, the king of kings, in front of thee fallen on his knees at thy snowy feet in bejewelled shoes, and outside the terrible Abyssinian eunuch looking like a messenger of death but clothed like an angel standing with a naked sword in his hand! Then, Oh, thou flower of the desert, swept away by that bloodstained dazzling ocean of grandeur with its foam of jealousy and rocks and shoals of intrigue, on what land of cruel death wast thou cast, or on what other land more splendid but more cruel?
Suddenly at this moment that crazy Meher Ali screamed out, "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!" I opened my eyes and saw that it was already light. My chaprasi came and handed me my letters and the cook waited with a salam for my orders about the meal.
I said, "No, I can't stay here any longer." That very day I packed up and removed to my office. Old Karim Khan of my office smiled a little as he saw me. I felt nettled at it but said nothing and fell to my work.
As evening approached I grew absent-minded, I felt as if I had an appointment to keep and the work of examining the cotton accounts appeared wholly useless, even the Nizamat of the Nizam did not appear to be of much worth. Whatever belonged to the present, whatever was moving and acting and working for bread at the moment appeared exceedingly trivial, meaningless, and contemptible.
I threw my pen down, closed my ledgers, got into my dog-cart and drove away. I noticed that it stopped of itself at the gate of the marble palace just at the hour of twilight. With quick steps I climbed the stairs and entered the room.
A heavy silence was reigning within. The dark rooms were looking sullen as if they had taken offence. My heart was full of contrition but there was no one to whom I could lay it bare, or of whom I could ask forgiveness. I wandered about the dark rooms with a vacant mind. I wished I had a musical instrument to which I could sing to the unknown: "O fire, the poor moth that made a vain effort to fly away has come back to thee! Forgive it but this once, burn both its wings and consume it in thy flame!"
Suddenly two tear drops fell from overhead on my brow. Dark masses of clouds overcast the top of the Avalli hills that day. The gloomy woods and the sooty waters of the Susta were waiting in a terrible suspense in an ominous calm. Suddenly the land, water and sky shivered and a wild tempest-blast rushed howling through the distant pathless woods displaying its lightning teeth like a raving maniac who had broken his chains. The desolate halls of the palace banged their doors and moaned in the bitterness of anguish.
The servants were all in the office and there was no one to light the lamps here. The night was cloudy and moonless. In the dense gloom within I could distinctly feel that a woman was lying on her face on the carpet below the bed—her desperate fingers clasping and tearing her long dishevelled hair. Blood was trickling down her fair brow and she was now laughing a hard harsh mirthless laugh, now bursting into violent wringing sobs, now rending her bodice and striking at her bare bosom as the wind roared in through the open window and rain poured in torrents and soaked her through and through.
All night there was no cessation of the storm or of the passionate cry. I wandered from room to room in the dark in unavailing sorrow. Whom could I console when no one was by? Whose was this agony of intense mortification? Whence arose this inconsolable sorrow?
The mad man now cried out, "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!"
I saw the day had dawned and Meher Ali was going round and round the palace with his usual cry in that dreadful weather. Suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps that man also had once lived in that house and that though he had come out mad he came there every day and went round and round, fascinated by the weird spell cast by the marble demon.
Despite the storm and rain I ran to him and asked, "Ho, Meher Ali, what is false?"
The man made no reply, but pushing me aside went round and round with his frantic cry like a fascinated bird flying round the jaws of a serpent, only making a desperate effort to warn himself by repeatedly crying, "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!"
