In a second and smaller court before the portal of the mosque men were learning the Koran.  Dressed in white they sat in circles, holding squares of some material that looked like cardboard covered with minute Arab characters, pretty, symmetrical curves and lines, dots and dashes.  The teachers squatted in the midst, expounding the sacred text in nasal voices with a swiftness and vivacity that seemed pugnacious.  There was violence within these courts.  Domini could imagine the worshippers springing up from their knees to tear to pieces an intruding dog of an unbeliever, then sinking to their knees again while the blood trickled over the sun-dried pavement and the lifeless body, lay there to rot and draw the flies.

“Allah!  Allah!  Allah!”

There was something imperious in such ardent, such concentrated and untiring worship, a demand which surely could not be overlooked or set aside.  The tameness, the half-heartedness of Western prayer and Western praise had no place here.  This prayer was hot as the sunlight, this praise was a mounting fire.  The breath of this human incense was as the breath of a furnace pouring forth to the gates of the Paradise of Allah.  It gave to Domini a quite new conception of religion, of the relation between Creator and created.  The personal pride which, like blood in a body, runs through all the veins of the mind of Mohammedanism, that measureless hauteur which sets the soul of a Sultan in the twisted frame of a beggar at a street corner, and makes impressive, even almost majestical, the filthy marabout, quivering with palsy and devoured by disease, who squats beneath a holy bush thick with the discoloured rags of the faithful, was not abased at the shrine of the warrior, Zerzour, was not cast off in the act of adoration.  These Arabs humbled themselves in the body.  Their foreheads touched the stones.  By their attitudes they seemed as if they wished to make themselves even with the ground, to shrink into the space occupied by a grain of sand.  Yet they were proud in the presence of Allah, as if the firmness of their belief in him and his right dealing, the fury of their contempt and hatred for those who looked not towards Mecca nor regarded Ramadan, gave them a patent of nobility.  Despite their genuflections they were all as men who knew, and never forgot, that on them was conferred the right to keep on their head-covering in the presence of their King.  With their closed eyes they looked God full in the face.  Their dull and growling murmur had the majesty of thunder rolling through the sky.

Mustapha had disappeared within the mosque, leaving Domini and Androvsky for the moment alone in the midst of the worshippers.  From the shadowy interior came forth a ceaseless sound of prayer to join the prayer without.  There was a narrow stone seat by the mosque door and she sat down upon it.  She felt suddenly weary, as one being hypnotised feels weary when the body and spirit begin to yield to the