The Flying Legion

For a time the Master sat in the thickening gloom, eating the dates and temmin wafers, drinking the coffee, pondering in deep silence. When the simple meal was ended, he plucked a little sprig of leaves from the khat plant in the bowl, and thrust them into his mouth. This khat, gathered in the mountains back of Hodeida, on the Red Sea not far from Bab el Mandeb, had been preserved by a process known to only a few Coast Arabs. The plant now in the bowl was part of a shipment that had been more than three months on the way; yet still the fresh aroma of it, as the Master crushed the thick-set, dark-green leaves, scented the darkening room with perfumes of Araby. Slowly, with the contemplative appreciation of the connoisseur, the Master absorbed the flavor and the wondrous stimulation of the "flower of paradise." The use of khat, his once-a-day joy and comfort, he had learned more than fifteen years before, on one of his exploring tours in Yemen. He could hardly remember just when and where he had first come to know the extraordinary mental and physical stimulus of this strange plant, dear to all Arabs, any more than he definitely recalled having learned the complex, poetical language of that Oriental land of mystery. Both language and the use of khat had come to him from contact with only the fringes of the country; and both had contributed to his vast, unsatisfied longing to know what lay beyond the forbidden zones that walled this land away from all the world.