O Ackazarpses!  Are all my enemies gone?

Ackazarpses: 

Illustrious Lady, the Nile has taken them all.

Queen:  [with intense devotion]

That holy river.

Ackazarpses: 

Illustrious Lady, will you sleep to-night?

Queen: 

Yes.  I shall sleep sweetly.

    [curtain]

The Tents of the Arabs

Dramatis Personae

The King
Bel-Narb, Aoob (camel-drivers)
The Chamberlain
Zabra (a notable)
Eznarza (a gypsy of the desert)

Scene:  Outside the gate of the city of Thalanna.

Time:  Uncertain.

Act I

Bel-Narb: 

By evening we shall be in the desert again.

Aoob: 

Yes.

Bel-Narb: 

Then no more city for us for many weeks.

Aoob: 

Ah!

Bel-Narb: 

We shall see the lights come out, looking back from the camel-track; that is the last we shall see of it.

Aoob: 

We shall be in the desert then.

Bel-Narb: 

The old angry desert.

Aoob: 

How cunningly the Desert hides his wells.  You would say he had an enmity with man.  He does not welcome you as the cities do.

Bel-Narb: 

He has an enmity.  I hate the desert.

Aoob: 

I think there is nothing in the world so beautiful as cities.

Bel-Narb: 

Cities are beautiful things.

Aoob: 

I think they are loveliest a little after dawn when night falls off from the houses.  They draw it away from them slowly and let it fall like a cloak and stand quite naked in their beauty to shine in some broad river; and the light comes up and kisses them on the forehead.  I think they are loveliest then.  The voices of men and women begin to arise in the streets, scarce audible, one by one, till a slow loud murmur arises and all the voices are one.  I often think the city speaks to me then:  she says in that voice of hers, “Aoob, Aoob, who one of these days shall die, I am not earthly, I have been always, I shall not die.”

Bel-Narb: 

I do not think that cities are loveliest at dawn.  We can see dawn in the desert any day.  I think they are loveliest just when the sun is set and a dusk steals along the narrower streets, a kind of mystery in which we can see cloaked figures and yet not quite discern whose figures they be.  And just when it would be dark, and out in the desert there would be nothing to see but a black horizon and a black sky on top of it, just then the swinging lanterns are lighted up and lights come out in windows one by one and all the colours of the raiments change.  Then a woman perhaps will slip from a little door and go away up the street into the night, and a man perhaps will steal by with a dagger for some old quarrel’s sake, and Skarmi will light up his house to sell brandy