The Boy from the Desert
A young man, raised in the comfort of a merchant’s home, struggles with an inexplicable longing for a life he never knew.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A young woman was taken to be a wife. She was young, fair, and carried the quiet grace of a dream. By the merchant, she had a son, and he grew proud, saying, 'My Arab child will grow into whatever culture the schools can train and prune him.' The youth excelled in all things, yet he never associated with his companions. The father had forbidden anyone to tell the boy that Arab blood ran in his veins, but sometimes the mother, in forgetfulness, sang songs in a strange tongue. When the time came, the merchant took his son into his business, but the youth looked on with gloomy discontent. He could not count the bolts of silk or muslin. A horrid unrest glowed at his heart. Watching prisoner birds in a shop, he felt his own heart was beating in a cage. Driven by the sight of a star-filled night, he fled toward the wilderness, finding his true home in the desert, where he embraced the freedom of his heritage, later sending back horses and dates as tokens to the father he could not bear to join again.
“I know at last what ails me. I understand the unrest that has been in my spirit; I have seen the stars enough. Henares was too much; the city was too small.”
This 1876 story captures the perennial 'Seattle restlessness'—the friction between the expectations of a burgeoning commercial city and the primal urge to escape into the wilderness. Just as the youth felt trapped by the 'marble walls' of the merchant’s life, many modern residents feel the squeeze of urban development against the draw of the surrounding landscape.
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