deliciously ludicrous angular style which is neither Arabic nor Egyptian, but a combination perhaps of both. Khalid reads the poetry under each of them and translates it into English. Mrs. Gotfry is charmed. Khalid is lost in thought. He lays the picture of Saladin on the table, lights another cigarette, looks intently upon his friend, his face beaming with his dream.
“Jamilah.” It was the first time he called her by her first name—an Arabic name which, as a Bahaist she had adopted. And she was neither surprised nor displeased.
“We need another Saladin today—a Saladin of the Idea, who will wage a crusade, not against Christianity or Mohammedanism, but against those Tataric usurpers who are now toadying to both.”
“Whom do you mean?”
“I mean the Turks. They were given a last chance to rise; they tried and failed. They can not rise. They are demoralised; they have no stamina, no character; no inborn love for truth and art; no instinctive or acquired sense of right and justice. Whiskey and debauch and high-sounding inanities about fraternity and equality can not regenerate an Empire.
The Turk must go: he will go.
But out in those deserts is a race which is always young, a race that never withers; a strong, healthy, keen-eyed, quick-witted race; a fighting, fanatical race; a race that gave Europe a civilisation, that gave the world a religion; a race with a past as glorious as Rome’s; and with a future, too, if we had an Ali or a Saladin. But He who made those heroes will make others like them, better, too. He may have made one already, and that one may be wandering now in the desert.
Now think what can be done in Arabia, think what the Arabs can accomplish, if American arms and an up-to-date Koran are spread