A thin echo of the Frenchman’s diatribe flickered through his memory, and he smiled.  He smiled because his eyes were open now.  He seemed to see this Christian fellow sitting on his bed, bare-footed, rumple-haired, talking dogmatically of perfumes and vials and stoppers thrown away, talking of faith in women.  And that was the jest.  For he seemed to see the women, over there in Paris, that the brothers of that naive fellow trusted—­trusted alone with a handsome young university student from Tunisia.  Ha-ha-ha!  Now he remembered.  He wanted to laugh out loud at a race of men that could be as simple as that.  He wanted to laugh at the bursting of the iridescent bubble of faith in the virtue of beautiful women.  The Arab knew!

A colour of health was on his face; his step had grown confident.  Of a sudden, and very quietly, all the mixed past was blotted out.  He heard only the chanting voices and the beating drums.

Once I came into the tent of a young beauty on a day of rain....  Beauty blinding....  Charms that ravished and made drunkards of the eyes....

His blood ran with the song, pulse and pulse.  The mute lightning came down through the trees and bathed his soul.  And, shivering a little, he let his thoughts go for the first time to the strange and virgin creature that awaited his coming there, somewhere, behind some blind house wall, so near.

“Thou hast suffered exile.  Now is thy reward prepared.”

What a fool!  What a fool he had been!

He wanted to run now.  The lassitude of months was gone from his limbs.  He wanted to fling aside that clogging crowd, run, leap, arrive.  How long was this hour?  Where was he?  He tried to see the housetops to know, but the glow was in his eyes.  He felt the hands of his comrades on his arms.

But now there was another sound in the air.  His ears, strained to the alert, caught it above the drums and voices—­a thin, high ululation.  It came from behind high walls and hung among the leaves of the trees, a phantom yodeling, the welcoming “you-you-you-you” of the women of Islam.

Before him he saw that the crowd had vanished.  Even the candles went away.  There was a door, and the door was open.

He entered, and no one followed.  He penetrated alone into an empty house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and the silence rustled.

He traversed a court and came into a chamber where there was a light.  He saw a negress, a Sudanese duenna, crouching in a corner and staring at him with white eyes.  He turned toward the other side of the room.

She sat on a high divan, like a throne, her hands palms together, her legs crossed.  In the completeness of her immobility she might have been a doll or a corpse.  After the strict fashion of brides, her eyebrows were painted in thick black arches, her lips drawn in scarlet, her cheeks splashed with rose.  Her face was a mask, and jewels in a crust hid the flame of her hair.  Under the stiff kohl of their lids her eyes turned neither to the left nor to the right.  She seemed not to breathe.  It is a dishonour for a maid to look or to breathe in the moment when her naked face suffers for the first time the gaze of the lord whom she has never seen.