The assent sounded determined yet reluctant.  She knew this was all against his will.  Mustapha took charge of them, and they set out down the narrow street, accompanied by a little crowd.  They crossed the glaring market-place, with its booths of red meat made black by flies, its heaps of refuse, its rows of small and squalid hutches, in which sat serious men surrounded by their goods.  The noise here was terrific.  Everyone seemed shouting, and the uproar of the various trades, the clamour of hammers on sheets of iron, the dry tap of the shoemaker’s wooden wand on the soles of countless slippers, the thud of the coffee-beater’s blunt club on the beans, and the groaning grunt with which he accompanied each downward stroke mingled with the incessant roar of camels, and seemed to be made more deafening and intolerable by the fierce heat of the sun, and by the innumerable smells which seethed forth upon the air.  Domini felt her nerves set on edge, and was thankful when they came once more into the narrow alleys that ran everywhere between the brown, blind houses.  In them there was shade and silence and mystery.  Mustapha strode before to show the way, Domini and Androvsky followed, and behind glided the little mob of barefoot inquisitors in long shirts, speechless and intent, and always hopeful of some chance scattering of money by the wealthy travellers.

The tumult of the market-place at length died away, and Domini was conscious of a curious, far-off murmur.  At first it was so faint that she was scarcely aware of it, and merely felt the soothing influence of its level monotony.  But as they walked on it grew deeper, stronger.  It was like the sound of countless multitudes of bees buzzing in the noon among flowers, drowsily, ceaselessly.  She stopped under a low mud arch to listen.  And when she listened, standing still, a feeling of awe came upon her, and she knew that she had never heard such a strangely impressive, strangely suggestive sound before.

“What is that?” she said.

She looked at Androvsky.

“I don’t know, Madame.  It must be people.”

“But what can they be doing?”

“They are praying in the mosque where Sidi-Zerzour is buried,” said Mustapha.

Domini remembered the perfume-seller.  This was the sound she had beard in his sunken chamber, infinitely multiplied.  They went on again slowly.  Mustapha had lost something of his flaring manner, and his gait was subdued.  He walked with a sort of soft caution, like a man approaching holy ground.  And Domini was moved by his sudden reverence.  It was impressive in such a fierce and greedy scoundrel.  The level murmur deepened, strengthened.  All the empty and dim alleys surrounding the unseen mosque were alive with it, as if the earth of the houses, the palm-wood beams, the iron bars of the tiny, shuttered windows, the very thorns of the brushwood roofs were praying ceaselessly and intently in secret under voices.  This was a world intense with prayer as a flame is intense with heat, with prayer penetrating and compelling, urgent in its persistence, powerful in its deep and sultry concentration, yet almost oppressive, almost terrible in its monotony.