Classic Poem

Where the giant stairs lead down,
Bowlders, and shingle, and sand,
From the lofty northern land
That fronts the far blue main,
To the vale of the Sacred Town,—
Where low on the southern plain
The wizard of Heat and Drouth,
With a sunbeam for a wand,
Upbuilds his world of deceit,
Palm grove and rippling pond
And garden and cool retreat,—
Even from north to south,
O'er the shimmering desert's face,
My laden file I trace,
My peaceful marching line;
Yet the mightiest army, I ween,
To conquer a darkened world,
The desert's eye hath seen,
Since Okba's troop was hurled,
In the might of the Prophet's word,
From the Nile to the trackless brine:—
Yea, into the sea he rode,
And, baring to heaven his sword,
He cried: “Did not the deep,
O Allah, my prowess tame,
Westward still would I sweep,
And the knowledge of Thy law,
In mercy on man bestowed,
Yet wider spread, and the awe
That is due to Thy holiest Name.”

Nay, never with mine may dare
The mightiest army compare,
Not even Iskander's own,
Which hewed the world to a throne.
Nor more my little worth
To glory like theirs must yield
Than the mightiest armies of earth
To the victor host I wield;
For not against spear and shield,
Nor the strength of a man's right arm,
Nor the speed of a horse's feet,
Nor the arrow's, deadlier fleet,
Nor the unseen bullet's harm,—
Not against these they war,
The weakness of men and brutes,
But against the demon powers
Behind the clouds that lurk,
That fly under heaven free,
That burrow in dank and mirk
Below the mountains' roots,
That haunt the caves of the sea,
That beleaguer these hearts of ours,
And God and His Prophet abhor.
Four are the legions of might
That muster at my command:
The first is the awful Word ,
Eternal, uncreate,
Yea! dateless with God's own date,
Unuttered and unheard,
But written in rays of light
On the mighty table of stone,
Where future and past are shown,
That leans at God's right hand.
Thence, for the weal of men,
In a book whose leaves are gold,
That jewels and silk enfold,
That was writ with an angel's pen,
It was brought from its high estate
Through the heavens to the lowest heaven
By Gabriel—such God's plan—
In the blessed, mystic even,
On the night of power and fate,
In the month of Ramadan.
But not, O crystal sphere,
In thee lay the Word concealed.
God willed that year by year
Its truths to the Prophet's ear
Should, line upon line, be revealed;
Whether, with chime of bells,
Gabriel the message tells;
Or thoughts, with silence shod,
From the Holy Spirit come
Into the secret place
Of the heart; or the very God,
Veiled, or face to face,
By day or in dreams of the night,
Speaks, and the heavens bloom bright,
Speaks, and the hells are dumb.

The next of the legions arrayed
To conquer at my command,
To quell the hosts of the banned,
The holy T RADITIONS be,
That age unto age enshrine
The wisdom, the power to aid,
Of the Prophet's words divine
To his friends, the trusted few;
With the holy deeds of his hand
That were done for their eyes to see,
An example of deeds to do
In every time and land.
These in men's hearts locked fast,
Unto children's children told,
And onward as heirlooms passed,
Richer than lands or gold,
After long centuries flown,
By holy men at last
Were gathered and made known,—
Saints enlightened by prayer
To mirror the Prophet's heart,
To winnow the false from the true,
To sift the weak from the strong,
The low from the lofty to part.
For “Wo be unto you
If ye utter my sayings wrong!
But guard them with anxious care:
And be mindful that ye assign
No words to me save ye know
In truth they are surely mine.”
So, in warning and ruth,
Spake the Prophet long ago.
And lo! the Traditions abide,
Mighty to strengthen and guide,
To chasten, to check, to impel,
To comfort, reprove, inspire,
And weak are the weapons of hell,
And they fall in fruitless ire
On the sunbright shields of the Truth.

Behold, as they pass in review,
The legions of the C ONSENT !
The mustering of the Laws,
The saying and doing blent
Of the learned and devout,
Men who saw clear and true,
Not fools in their folly blind,
Nor drunken with pride of doubt,
Nor scoffers that, snarling behind,
Snap at the heels of the Cause;
But the first of the Blessed, they,
The Prophet's helpers at need,
The mates of the Banishment,
The followers of the Flight.
Nor had these been all, but their seed
In every age might we count,
Had God for our sins not sent
Wrangling and fell despite,
Which have blinded our eyes to the way
That leads to his holy fount.
But yet shall the Faithful learn
The last, first lesson of Peace;
And the precious flood shall return
No more to the empty sands,
But be dipped by men's eager hands,
And the world's long thirst shall cease;
And, forgetting its fevered years,
Islam shall forward leap,
As the panting hart, that deep
Has drunk of a hidden rill,
Leaps and forgets its fears;
And they that strove shall be still,
And the evil shall cease from scathe,
And Islam, rousing its youth.
As a mighty man from a swoon,
Shall renew its morn of Faith,
And the triumphs of its Truth
Shall round to a fadeless noon.
Last of my legions four,
The D ECISIONS of the wise,
The new and the newer lore
That still from the old arise;
Yea, the new Truth wrought from the old
For the needs of the newer day,
Never the old to gainsay,
For the Truth is eternally true,
But only the old made new,
As a tale to the young retold.
The sun that smiled on the morn
Of the holy Prophet's birth
Rose to-day on the earth,
New to the new day born;
Even so, after centuries rolled,
The Truth abides the same;
And so long as sin its net
Shall spread, and the heedless fall
And for light in the darkness call,
Truth unto Truth shall be set,
And a new Truth forth shall flare,
As a new flame lightens the air,
When flame has been set to flame.

So march to victories new
My legions with victory bright.
But, lo! in their train a host
Of warriors, doughty and true,
Heroes, although they boast
Only a mortal might.
The Roots of the Law they hight,
The Creeds from the one creed wrought,
The Renderings of the Laws,
The Comments on the Word,
The History of the Cause,
The Rules of Thought Unheard,
The Arts of the Spoken Thought.
Last, as if led in chains,
Follow in captive ranks
The books, in motley guise,
Of the lore of the prying Franks,
Who spare not earth nor sky,
Nor future nor moldering past,
But search with tireless pains,
If haply some golden grains
Of fact they may find at last;
Yet, never with knowledge wise,
And wretched for all their gains,
In doubt they live and die.

Mightiest force among men,
And swiftest fleeting, the breath;
Speech, whose birth is a death;
For, the ear of the hearer to reach,
On the speaker's lips it must die;
And, heard and uttered by each,
And uttered and heard again,
Who shall say for a sooth
That its message has not been wrought
In the limbec of men's thought
From the Truth to a semblance of Truth,
Which at heart is wholly a lie?
But the Book was born, and lo!
Like a footprint on the strand
That has hardened into stone,
The Truth, released from change,
Outlasting ruler and throne,
Abides, while centuries range,
While nations ebb and flow,
In every time and land,
The Truth; else none might know
The thoughts of the great of yore.
For, ever the newer speech
The newer thought would teach,
Under the sheltering fame
Of the wise and ancient lore;
And the Truth—like the desert mound
Slow shifting day by day,
Till, ere one marks, it is found
New-shapen and far away—
Would be changed in all but name,
Not abide, like the hills, the same,
Flashing the morn abroad
From their iron crests, which took
The rose of creation's dawn—
Themselves the earliest book,
On whose carven crags, deep-drawn,
Stands written the will of God.
Faint on the paling sky,
The wolf-tail's white foreruns
The dawn's quick-coming red;
And our prayers go up on high
To the Lord of dawns and suns.
Then flames like darts are sped,
And lo, the sun! and anon
O'er the rosy mists he has clomb,
The terrors of night are gone,
The day with its cheer has come.
Then southward, southward still,
Under the opaline arch,
Over the quivering sand,
And mocked on every hand
By the shifting mirage, we march;
Past shadowless mountains of thirst,
Through valleys with never a rill,—
Rivers that God has cursed,
That bleach with the bones of their doom.
At last in a veil of white
The sun goes down, and the west
Is a garden of fiery bloom;
And the prayers of the Faithful rise,
And beast and man take rest,
And the stars ope their myriad eyes,
And he that gave day gives night.
So, day after day,
For a score of days we press
Ever our southward way
Through a wilder wilderness,
To the region set apart
In the desert's deepest heart
To shelter our sacred lore.
There at last shall we halt,
Where the oasis lies enisled
In a hundred leagues of sand
That surge on every hand,
By the hot winds driven and piled,
Barren as ashes or salt.
But, to the Faithful's eyes,
A blessed bound it lies,
No foeman shall pass o'er.
Yea, in the desert's deep
To their grave in the sands might go
Army on army sent
To work our mission scathe,
And we should awake and sleep
And awake, and never know
Evil deed or intent,
Safe in our Stronghold of Faith.

O Desert, vouchsafed to be,
From all eternity,
The shelter of God's Truth,
As God's compassion large,
And lasting as the will
That wrought thee and endueth,
Receive thy priceless charge!
Accept the casket' we bring
Of God's provisioning
For the healing of men's ill.
So guard it from every taint
Of the Unfaith that fills the earth,
That from it shall go forth,
Like rays of the strong sun's light,
The healing of Truth to fill
The lands where men sicken and faint,
In the twilight of Faith or its night.
All is confusion there
And blindness and whirling haste;
The days of their lives men waste
In hurrying everywhere,
And arriving nowhere at last.
They cannot see God's sky
For the smoke of their ceaseless toil,
And earth shows dull and awry
Through the dust of their mad turmoil.
But here, in the desert's hush,
In the crystal of its air,
Which is healing more than art,
Where naught with din or rush
Distracts the ear or eye,
But lion and lizard wear
The desert's tawny dye,
And a bowshot from the bound
Of his palms man hears no sound
But the beating of his heart;
Where, beyond the garden's green,
Only the infinite sheen
Of the desert spreads around;
And, day by day the same,
The sun on his opal throne,
Crowned with the gold of noon,
Sits in his veil of flame;
And night by night the moon
Reigns in splendor alone;
Or the stars, like jewels sewn
On the blue-black robe of night,
Blaze, and the world is bright;—
Here, and only here,
Of all earth's regions trod,
Stands man, with vision clear,
Alone with the only God;
And the Truth forevermore
From the desert, as ever of yore,
On earth shall be shed abroad;
And the gardens of earth that bloom,
The gardens no less shall become
Of the holy Faith, and man,
In the desert brought face to face
With the infinite blessing and ban,
Shall live in every place
As under the eye of God.