all night long, and men will sit on benches outside his door playing skabash by the glare of a small green lantern, while they light great bubbling pipes and smoke nargroob.  O, it is all very good to watch.  And I like to think as I smoke and see these things that somewhere, far away, the desert has put up a huge red cloud like a wing so that all the Arabs know that next day the Siroc will blow, the accursed breath of Eblis the father of Satan.

Aoob: 

Yes, it is pleasant to think of the Siroc when one is safe in a city, but I do not like to think about it now, for before the day is out we will be taking pilgrims to Mecca, and who ever prophesied or knew by wit what the desert had in store?  Going into the desert is like throwing bone after bone to a dog, some he will catch and some of them he will drop.  He may catch our bones, or we may go by and come to gleaming Mecca.  O-ho, I would I were a merchant with a little booth in a frequented street to sit all day and barter.

Bel-Narb: 

Aye, it is easier to cheat some lord coming to buy silk and ornaments in a city than to cheat death in the desert.  Oh, the desert, the desert, I love the beautiful cities and I hate the desert.

Aoob:  [pointing off L]

Who is that?

Bel-Narb: 

What?  There by the desert’s edge where the camels are?

Aoob: 

Yes, who is it?

Bel-Narb: 

He is staring across the desert the way that the camels go.  They say that the King goes down to the edge of the desert and often stares across it.  He stands there for a long time of an evening looking towards Mecca.

Aoob: 

Of what use is it to the King to look towards Mecca?  He cannot go to Mecca.  He cannot go into the desert for one day.  Messengers would run after him and cry his name and bring him back to the council-hall or to the chamber of judgments.  If they could not find him their heads would be struck off and put high up upon some windy roof:  the judges would point at them and say, “They see better there!”

Bel-Narb: 

No, the King cannot go away into the desert.  If God were to make me King I would go down to the edge of the desert once, and I would shake the sand out of my turban and out of my beard and then I would never look at the desert again.  Greedy and parched old parent of thousands of devils!  He might cover the wells with sand, and blow with his Siroc, year after year and century after century, and never earn one of my curses—­if God made me King.

Aoob: 

They say you are like the King.

Bel-Narb: 

Yes, I am like the King.  Because his father disguised himself as a camel-driver and came through our villages.  I often say to myself, “God is just.  And if I could disguise myself as the King and drive him out to be a camel-driver, that would please God for He is just.”

Aoob: