“There, that’s better.”

Her voice was practical.  He did not move, but stood there.

“I’ve done what I can, Monsieur Androvsky.”

Then he turned slowly, and she saw, with amazement, that there were tears in his eyes.  He did not thank her or say a word.

A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot gazelles lying in a patch of sunlight by a wired-in fowl-run.  Domini went after him, and Androvsky and honest Mustapha—­still vigorously proclaiming his own virtues—­brought up the rear.  They came into the most curious garden she had ever seen.

It was long and narrow and dishevelled, without grass or flowers.  The uneven ground of it was bare, sun-baked earth, hard as parquet, rising here into a hump, falling there into a depression.  Immediately behind the cabaret, where the dead gazelles with their large glazed eyes lay by the fowl-run, was a rough wooden trellis with vines trained over it, making an arbour.  Beyond was a rummage of orange trees, palms, gums and fig trees growing at their own sweet will, and casting patterns of deep shade upon the earth in sharp contrast with the intense yellow sunlight which fringed them where the leafage ceased.  An attempt had been made to create formal garden paths and garden beds by sticking rushes into little holes drilled in the ground, but the paths were zig-zag as a drunkard’s walk, and the round and oblong beds contained no trace of plants.  On either hand rose steep walls of earth, higher than a man, and crowned with prickly thorn bushes.  Over them looked palm trees.  At the end of the garden ran a slow stream of muddy water in a channel with crumbling banks trodden by many naked feet.  Beyond it was yet another lower wall of earth, yet another maze of palms.  Heat and silence brooded here like reptiles on the warm mud of a tropic river in a jungle.  Lizards ran in and out of the innumerable holes in the walls, and flies buzzed beneath the ragged leaves of the fig trees and crawled in the hot cracks of the earth.

The landlord wished to put a table under the vine close to the cabaret wall, but Domini begged him to bring it to the end of the garden near the stream.  With the furious assistance of honest Mustapha he carried it there and quickly laid it in the shadow of a fig tree, while Domini and Androvsky waited in silence on two straw-bottomed chairs.

The atmosphere of the garden was hostile to conversation.  The sluggish muddy stream, the almost motionless trees, the imprisoned heat between the surrounding walls, the faint buzz of the flies caused drowsiness to creep upon the spirit.  The long ride, too, and the ardent desert air, made this repose a luxury.  Androvsky’s face lost its emotional expression as he gazed almost vacantly at the brown water shifting slowly by between