spell of the operator.  Androvsky remained standing.  His eyes were fixed on the ground, and she thought his face looked almost phantom-like, as if the blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint set there by the sun.  He stayed quite still.  The dark shadow cast by the towering mosque fell upon him, and his immobile figure suggested to her ranges of infinite melancholy.  She sighed as one oppressed.  There was an old man praying near them at the threshold of the door, with his face turned towards the interior.  He was very thin, almost a skeleton, was dressed in rags through which his copper-coloured body, sharp with scarce-covered bones, could be seen, and had a scanty white beard sticking up, like a brush, at the tip of his pointed chin.  His face, worn with hardship and turned to the likeness of parchment by time and the action of the sun, was full of senile venom; and his toothless mouth, with its lips folded inwards, moved perpetually, as if he were trying to bite.  With rhythmical regularity, like one obeying a conductor, he shot forth his arms towards the mosque as if he wished to strike it, withdrew them, paused, then shot them forth again.  And as his arms shot forth he uttered a prolonged and trembling shriek, full of weak, yet intense, fury.

He was surely crying out upon God, denouncing God for the evils that had beset his nearly ended life.  Poor, horrible old man!  Androvsky was closer to him than she was, but did not seem to notice him.  Once she had seen him she could not take her eyes from him.  His perpetual gesture, his perpetual shriek, became abominable to her in the midst of the bowing bodies and the humming voices of prayer.  Each time he struck at the mosque and uttered his piercing cry she seemed to hear an oath spoken in a sanctuary.  She longed to stop him.  This one blasphemer began to destroy for her the mystic atmosphere created by the multitudes of adorers, and at last she could no longer endure his reiterated enmity.

She touched Androvsky’s arm.  He started and looked at her.

“That old man,” she whispered.  “Can’t you speak to him?”

Androvsky glanced at him for the first time.

“Speak to him, Madame?  Why?”

“He—­he’s horrible!”

She felt a sudden disinclination to tell Androvsky why the old man was horrible to her.

“What do you wish me to say to him?”

“I thought perhaps you might be able to stop him from doing that.”

Androvsky bent down and spoke to the old man in Arabic.

He shot out his arms and reiterated his trembling shriek.  It pierced the sound of prayer as lightning pierces cloud.

Domini got up quickly.

“I can’t bear it,” she said, still in a whisper.  “It’s as if he were cursing God.”

Androvsky looked at the old man again, this time with profound attention.

“Isn’t it?” she said.  “Isn’t it as if he were cursing God while the whole world worshipped?  And that one cry of hatred seems louder than the praises of the whole world.”