“Batouch will be angry.  There will be white foam on his lips,” whispered
Hadj, dropping his chin and chuckling low in his throat.  “This way,
Madame.”

He led her quickly across the gardens to the Rue Berthe, and down a number of small streets, till they reached a white house before which, on a hump, three palm trees grew from one trunk.  Beyond was waste ground, and further away a stretch of sand and low dunes lost in the darkness of the, as yet, moonless night.  Domini looked at the house and at Hadj, and wondered if it would be foolish to enter.

“What is it?” she asked again.

But he only replied, “Madame will see!” and struck his flat hand upon the door.  It was opened a little way, and a broad face covered with little humps and dents showed, the thick lips parted and muttering quickly.  Then the face was withdrawn, the door opened wider, and Hadj beckoned to Domini to go in.  After a moment’s hesitation she did so, and found herself in a small interior court, with a tiled floor, pillars, and high up a gallery of carved wood, from which, doubtless, dwelling-rooms opened.  In the court, upon cushions, were seated four vacant-looking men, with bare arms and legs and long matted hair, before a brazier, from which rose a sharply pungent perfume.  Two of these men were very young, with pale, ascetic faces and weary eyes.  They looked like young priests of the Sahara.  At a short distance, upon a red pillow, sat a tiny boy of about three years old, dressed in yellow and green.  When Domini and Hadj came into the court no one looked at them except the child, who stared with slowly-rolling, solemn eyes, slightly shifting on the pillow.  Hadj beckoned to Domini to seat herself upon some rugs between the pillars, sat down beside her and began to make a cigarette.  Complete silence prevailed.  The four men stared at the brazier, holding their nostrils over the incense fumes which rose from it in airy spirals.  The child continued to stare at Domini.  Hadj lit his cigarette.  And time rolled on.

Domini had desired violence, and had been conveyed into a dumbness of mystery, that fell upon her turmoil of spirit like a blow.  What struck her as especially strange and unnatural was the fact that the men with whom she was sitting in the dim court of this lonely house had not looked at her, did not appear to know that she was there.  Hadj had caught the aroma of their meditations with the perfume of the incense, for his eyes had lost their mischief and become gloomily profound, as if they stared on bygone centuries or watched a far-off future.  Even the child began to look elderly, and worn as with fastings and with watchings.  As the fumes perpetually ascended from the red-hot coals of the brazier the sharp smell of the perfume grew stronger.  There was in it something provocative and exciting that was like a sound, and Domini marvelled that the four men who crouched over it and drank it in perpetually could be unaffected by its influence when she, who was at some distance from it, felt dawning on her desires of movement, of action, almost a physical necessity to get up and do something extraordinary, absurd or passionate, such as she had never done or dreamed of till this moment.