Farah rammed down a pole outside my door and nailed the skull to the top of it. I stood by and watched him without enthusiasm. ‘What is the good of that, Farah?’ I asked him. ‘The thief will already be far away. And must I now have that skull of yours set up just outside my door?’ Farah did not answer, he took a step back to survey his work and laughed. But next morning, by the foot of the pole a stone was lying, and underneath it a hundred-rupee note. By what dark, crooked paths it had got there I was not told, and now shall never know.

Farah, as already told, was a strict Mohammedan, burning in the spirit.

In speaking about Mohammedans and Mohammedanism, I am well aware that I got to know in Africa only a primitive, unsophisticated Mohammedanism. Of Mohammedan philosophy or theology I know nothing; from my own experience I can but tell how Islam manifests itself in the course of thought and conduct of the unlearned Orthodox. All the same I feel that you cannot live for a long time among Mohammedans without your own view of life being in some way influenced by theirs.

I have been told that the word ‘Islam’ in itself means submission: the Creed may be defined as the religion which ordains acceptance. And the Prophet does not accept with reluctance or with regret but with rapture. There is in his preaching, as I know it from his unlearned disciples, a tremendous erotic element.

‘Sweet scents, incense and perfumes are dear to my heart,’ says the Prophet. ‘But the glory of women is dearer. The glory of women is dear to my heart. But the glory of prayer is dearer.’

In contrast to many modern Christian ideologies, Islam does not occupy itself with justifying the ways of God to man; its Yes is universal and unconditional. For the lover does not measure the worth of his mistress by a moral or social rod. But the mistress, by absorbing into her own being the dark and dangerous phenomena of life, mysteriously transluminates and sanctifies them, and imbues them with sweetness. An old Danish love poem has it: ‘There is witchcraft on your lips, an abyss within your gaze.’ What the wooer desires is freedom to adore, what he craves and thirsts for is the assurance of being loved back. Kadidja’s caravaneer, with his eyes on the new moon, in the words of a later author, even though in a somewhat altered sense, is ‘God’s own mad lover, dying on a kiss’.