“You are my brother:  not they.  I am not of these people, Raoul!”

But then he would go in, under the black arch and the black shade of the false-pepper trees.  In the darkness he felt the trees, centuries old, and all the blank houses watching him....

To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of them who could wait.  The hush of the desert troubled him.  Youth troubled him.  His lips were dry.

He had come to an arbour covered with a vine.  Whose it was, on what house-holder’s roof it was reared, he had never known.  He entered.

“She is not here.”  He moistened his lips with his tongue.

He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.

He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the terrace.  It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when, half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and uncovered her face.

To-night she uncovered it herself.  She put back the hooded fold of her haik, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.

The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city.  For an hour nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....

That hush was disrupted.  The single long crash of a human throat!  Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!

“La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul’lah!  Allah Akbar! God is great!”

One by one the dim towers took it up.  The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town.  It searched the white runways.  It penetrated the vine-bowered arbour.  Little by little, tower by tower, it died.  In a fondouk outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail.  A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.  And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.

Under the vine Habib whispered:  “No, I don’t care anything about thy name.  A name is such a little thing.  I’ll call thee ‘Nedjma,’ because we are under the stars.”

“Ai, Nedjmetek—­’Thy Star’!” The girl’s lips moved drowsily.  In the dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking, unquestioning, always unquestioning.

That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness.  He took her shoulders between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper: 

“Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words?  Talk!  Say things to me!  Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of themselves.  And I am not like that!”