“Hadj is nearly dead with fear,” whispered Batouch, complacently.  Domini’s lips curled.

“Does not Madame think Irena beautiful as the moon on the waters of the Oued Beni-Mora?”

“Indeed I don’t,” she replied bluntly.  “And I think a man who can be afraid of such a little thing must be afraid of the children in the street.”

“Little!  But Irena is tall as a female palm in Ourlana.”

“Tall!”

Domini looked at her again more carefully, and saw that Batouch spoke the truth.  Irena was unusually tall, but her excessive narrowness, her tiny bones, and the delicate way in which she held herself deceived the eye and gave her a little appearance.

“So she is; but who could be afraid of her?  Why, I could pick her up and throw her over that moon of yours.”

“Madame is strong.  Madame is like the lioness.  But Irena is the most terrible girl in all Beni-Mora if she loves or if she is angry, the most terrible in all the Sahara.”

Domini laughed.

“Madame does not know her,” said Batouch, imperturbably.  “But Madame can ask the Arabs.  Many of the dancers of Beni-Mora are murdered, each season two or three.  But no man would try to murder Irena.  No man would dare.”

The poet’s calm and unimpassioned way of alluding to the most horrible crimes as if they were perfectly natural, and in no way to be condemned or wondered at, amazed Domini even more than his statement about Irena.

“Why do they murder the dancers?” she asked quickly.

“For their jewels.  At night, in those little rooms with the balconies which Madame has seen, it is easy.  You enter in to sleep there.  You close your eyes, you breathe gently and a little loud.  The woman hears.  She is not afraid.  She sleeps.  She dreams.  Her throat is like that”—­he threw back his head, exposing his great neck.  “Just before dawn you draw your knife from your burnous.  You bend down.  You cut the throat without noise.  You take the jewels, the money from the box by the bed.  You go down quietly with bare feet.  No one is on the stair.  You unbar the door—­and there before you is the great hiding-place.”

“The great hiding-place!”

“The desert, Madame.”  He sipped his coffee.  Domini looked at him, fascinated.

Suzanne shivered.  She had been listening.  The loud contralto cry of the Jewess rose up, with its suggestion of violence and of rough indifference.  And Domini repeated softly: 

“The great hiding-place.”

With every moment in Beni-Mora the desert seemed to become more—­more full of meaning, of variety, of mystery, of terror.  Was it everything?  The garden of God, the great hiding-place of murderers!  She had called it, on the tower, the home of peace.  In the gorge of El-Akbara, ere he prayed, Batouch had spoken of it as a vast realm of forgetfulness, where the load of memory slips from the weary shoulders and vanishes into the soft gulf of the sands.