“Thou shalt be content.  Thou art a man now.  The days of thy learning are accomplished.  Thou hast suffered exile; now is thy reward prepared.  And the daughter of the notary, thy betrothed, is as lovely as a palm tree in the morning and as mild as sweet milk, beauteous as a pearl, Habib, a milk-white pearl.  See!”

Drawing from his burnoose a sack of Moroccan lambskin, he opened it and lifted out a pearl.  His fingers, even at rest, seemed to caress it.  They slid back among the treasure in the sack, the bargaining price for the first wife of the only son of a man blessed by God.  And now they brought forth also a red stone, cut in the fashion of Tunis.

“A milk-white sea pearl, look thou; to wed in a jewel with the blood-red ruby that is the son of my breast.  Ah, Habib, my Habib, but thou shalt be content!”

They stood in the sunlight before the green door of a mosque.  As the hand of the city had reached out for Habib through the city gate, so now the prayer, throbbing like a tide across the pillared mystery of the court, reached out through the doorway in the blaze....  And he heard his own voice, strange in his mouth, shallow as a bleat: 

“Why, then, sire—­why, oh! why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?”

“They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for God is God!”

“And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?”

“When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two lances to thy hand—­thine own and his.  And it is written, Habib, son of Habib, that thou shalt be content....  Put off thy shoes now and come.  It is time we were at prayer.”

Summer died.  Autumn grew.  With the approach of winter an obscure nervousness spread over the land.  In the dust of its eight months’ drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another, the desert waited for the coming of the rains.  The earth cracked.  A cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out—­from their tents on the cactus steppes, from fondouks on the camel tracks of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan....  The cloud passed on and vanished in the sky.  On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.  Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still.  The jackals came closer to the tents.  The city slept again, but in its sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....

In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little.  It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves.  The girl’s eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms.  His face was the colour of the moon.

“Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or lead me there by the hand?  Am I that?”