Perth Amboy evening news., 1922-11-20
NriumphS Of
By MELVILLE DAWSON pOST =
g 1000 NEA Service. Inc

OF aISe4s.
This was a thing hat he had al
ways hated. 1t was not the enemy
in the front that threatened the
army, it was these loving creatures
in the rear. Ruthless and deter
mined, he had set his face against
it. The army should be celibate.
And he had broken and elbowed out
the men who would cucumber
themselves with a loving heart.
Well, he had lived by the rule
himself There had been no woman
about him on the frontiers of the
empire! When he came. now and
then, to London. the current of life
in which they moved failed to touch
him. They were creatures apart.
He knew of them only what APP
peared before the eye. And, while
he saw the beauty which they as
sembled, he saw also the thousand
follies that seemed to give them
pleasure, and he wondered in what
mysterious charm lay their appal-
ling influence on his soldiers.
And on this evening, alone in this
mysterious city, he began to be as
sailed by a curious consuming won
der. He began to doubt the value
OF the one thing that he had gotten
out of life. What was this other
thing that gave an ignorant soldier
and a common housemaid, motion
less and silent in the shadows of
a Towering vine, the faces of the
angels?
What did this mysterious word
mean that men used to designate
this thing? He knewS what the love
Of life a for he had seen every
sort of creature fight desperately to
live; and he knew the love of gain
and the love of power. But men,
all men, everywhere, imperiled and
abandoned these things for the love
of women. and they did it with no
doubt. like n who trades glass for
a jewel?
He reflected. There was no vir-
tue in the thing that he had, in the
thing for which he traded away his
life, thus to transf1gure the human
face. And when he should come
up out of this great desert south
toward Khartum, he would be old!
Suddenly he realized that the
morse could not go on, and that he
controlling it with difficulty.
He had traversed the Rue Muski,
skirted the Place Esbekiya and was
about to cross the Kamel Pasha,
tAtL olIOiI bOulCNdlu SultElHS LIS
Place Esbekiya from the north,
when a procession stopped him.
The sacred carpet had arrived
from Mecca. The streets before
him were gorged with people, and
the whole city echoed with weird
Oriental cries. There was little new
to him in the orgy. Of these native
ceremonies, with their riot of sound
and color, and their vast medley OF
assembled from the waste
of the earth.
For a moment, as a soldier. he
approved the precaution taken by
the English authorities-a company
of troops thrown in, here and there,
to divide the tribes and the horde
of natives that surged along with
every color. and with every sort of
cry, and every extravagant gesture.
He approved, too, the diplomacy
that gave these regiments a gala air
with their bands of music as though
they rivaled the Arab and the fellah
in doing honor to the holy relic,
while. in fact, they held the fingers
Of ENGLAND on the city lest they
slip off in a sudden rising of these
hordes.
Then his mind returned to its
reflection, with an idle interest he
watched the strange, half-naked,
primeval creatures that appeared,
issuing out of the vast limitless
ocean of sand that lay endlessly to
the south. from tribes, old and I'M
changed since the days of Abraham
from the uncharted
deeps Of the Sahara. naked and sub
like the Baptist.
What lay far off there in the dead
cities OF this sand-swept wilderness
Whence came these mad men,
gaunt, covered with hair, and in
hnitely old. no human creature
could say. Perhaps the magician
and the wizard of old times lived on
there. And there in ancient tombs,
in honeycombed walls sitting full. Of
sand. in strange wilderness eternal
ly dead and silent, old wise men
abode who knew the ancient formu-
las by which the inexorable course
Of nature could be turned aside.
Perhaps they maintained there to
this day that mysterious power
which the sacred books of all re-
ligions agree that certain dread
members of the race possessed in
the morning of the world.
And the streaming horde, with it's
cries and colors, slashed and inter-
sected by smart European regi-