Читать книгу Unsought Adventure - Howard Angus Kennedy - Страница 3

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“I have sought for adventure; yea, with the horses and chariots of a king; yet greater than all my adventures have come to my herd-boy unsought....

“In the twilight, weary of courtiers, I fled from my palace. On the banks of the River I walked between Ali the Man of Adventure and Hassan the Cynic. And Ali told of strange events, all outward things and deeds; but Hassan, scorning outward things, laid bare the windings of the common soul. Then said I:

“Adventures come not to the adventurous alone. I am curious to know how Hassan’s common minds would act in Ali’s strange events. The thread of life is spun of married strands, of thought and action intertwined: divorce them not....

“There be mysteries of matter, and there be mysteries of Man transcending all. Strange is it when a treasure, dead and buried, stretches forth unseen hand from unknown hiding-place and cracks the whip of fate; and stranger when at a touch the honest man turns thief....

“Three things have I marvelled at, yea, four have I graven on my tablets of remembrance; a proud young man’s humility; a humble girl, her pride; a wanton mother’s yearning for the son she has betrayed, and a simple rustic house-wife on the judgment throne.

“Of these then will I speak as I have seen, twining the action with the thought in many-colored thread of life; not by the pattern you or I might frame, but as it truly flowed from Fortune’s wheel.

“Not for high show of cunning art I speak, to court sophisticated lips and hear the palace cry ‘The king of men is king of words!’—but walking free with friends by moonlit stream, free as the naked air that plays among the trees. The censure of the proud,—as who should say ‘The king puts off his robes!’—to me is only praise.

“Not in the guise of a king, despising simple folk, their words and ways, but wandering friendly in the haunts of men I learned the lessons of the heart."

—Autobiography of the Caliph Haroun al Raschid.