Her signal answered; for a slender wand Of moonbeam touched the Dreamer on the mouth. The caravan looked upward with a shout And set its camels rolling to the south, Murmuring: "Blue Persian night, none ever saw You through your own sheer purity before us. Rise up our songs as bubbles from the sand ..." Somewhere among the camels rose this chorus: Dong! Dong! Lurching along Out of the dusk Into the night. Noiseless and lusty, Dreamy and dusty, Looms the long caravan-line into sight. Dong! Dong! Never a song, Never a footfall A breath or a sigh. Ghostly and stolid, Stately and squalid, Creeps the monotonous caravan by. Dong! Dong! Fugitive throng. Out of the dark Into the night, Silent and lonely, Gone!... the bells only Tells us a caravan once was in sight. IV THE INWARDNESS OF THE MERCHANT Moussa, the son of the Crypto-Jew, Had eaten his fill of yellow stew And a bit besides (as a business man He was far too quick for the caravan, Who loved him not, though it feared his guile). Moussa then: "I shall walk awhile "To ease my soul of its heavy load." His pious friends: "May you find a road," And winked. "His soul has begun to feel There's nothing left but a march to steal." But one from the village, decoying quail For the governor's pot, came back with a tale Of a lean arm shaken against the sky Like a stunted thorn, and this piteous cry: "As sound within an ice-bound desert mewed Drags out existence at the very core Of isolation, as breakers slip ashore In vainly eternal whispers to the nude Reef-coral, where no human feet intrude Upon the purity of stillness; or As, far from life, unmated eagles soar Above the hilltops' breathless solitude, "So moves my love, like these a thing apart, Fierce, in the ruined temple of my heart, Shy as a shooting star that peers new-risen Mid strangers. Even so. Pent in the prison Of space my soul, a lonely planet, wheels ... Men call the sum of loneliness 'Ideals.'" This is the plaint that the cross-road heard Where it strikes from Kashan to Burujird. The townsmen, met by the sun-dried stream, Caught a voice high up like an angel's scream Or a teaspoon tapping the bowl of heaven, And they cried: "_Ajab!_ May we be forgiven, "But it sounds a soul of the rarer sort Whose wings are set for no earthly port." And the answer came, as they cried: "Who's that?" "One that sells short weight in mutton fat." V THE LESSON OF THE CAMEL