that my father was on his death bed and the land would be left in my weak hands. To prove, too, that blood is thicker than the clogging dust of the centuries, and that Allah does not bring two human souls together in sport, to whirl them apart again as the sand storm whirls the yellow grains of the desert!
“The prophecy?” she went on. “The prophecy of the blades which thou dost not know in thy mind, but which thou knowest in thy soul? Listen! Thou, who earnest out of the West, heeding the silent call which drew thee to the East—thine own East! For cousin thou art to me. Thou, too, hast Gengizkhani blood in thy veins, the blood of the ancient, undying race, and thou showest it in this—and that—and this!” indicating his high cheek bones, his black, curly hair, his aquiline nose with the nervous, flaring nostrils which, according to Sussex tradition, had been the racial inheritance of some Spanish sailor shipwrecked on England's white cliffs in the days of the Armada and Good Queen Bess.
“Cousin to me!” she repeated, with a little lilt in her voice, like the lilt of an old, sweet song.
And she told him how her own people, the Gengizkhani, the descendants of Genghiz Khan the Great on the male and of the Prophet Mohammed on the female side, had once ruled all Central Asia, from the Outer Mongolian snows to the scorched plains of Rajputana, from Anatolia to Chinese Turkestan, from the painted gates of Moscow to the ragged basalt frontier of Siam and Amoy; how they had fought hard to conquer, harder yet to hold their
