Irena was not an Ouled Nail.  She was a Kabyle woman born in the mountains of Djurdjura, not far from the village of Tamouda.  As a child she had lived in one of those chimneyless and windowless mud cottages with red tiled roofs which are so characteristic a feature of La Grande Kabylie.  She had climbed barefoot the savage hills, or descended into the gorges yellow with the broom plant and dipped her brown toes in the waters of the Sebaou.  How had she drifted so far from the sharp spurs of her native hills and from the ruddy-haired, blue-eyed people of her tribe?  Possibly she had sinned, as the Kabyle women often sin, and fled from the wrath that she would understand, and that all her fierce bravery could not hope to conquer.  Or perhaps with her Kabyle blood, itself a brew composed of various strains, Greek, Roman, as well as Berber, were mingling some drops drawn from desert sources, which had manifested themselves physically in her dark hair, mentally in a nomadic instinct which had forbidden her to rest among the beauties of Ait Ouaguennoun, whose legendary charm she did not possess.  There was the look of an exile in her face, a weariness that dreamed, perhaps, of distant things.  But now that she danced that fled, and the gleam of flame-lit steel was in her eyes.

Tangled and vital impressions came to Domini as she watched.  Now she saw Jael and the tent, and the nails driven into the temples of the sleeping warrior.  Now she saw Medea in the moment before she tore to pieces her brother and threw the bloody fragments in Aetes’s path; Clytemnestra’s face while Agamemnon was passing to the bath, Delilah’s when Samson lay sleeping on her knee.  But all these imagined faces of named women fled like sand grains on a desert wind as the dance went on and the recurrent melody came back and back and back with a savage and glorious persistence.  They were too small, too individual, and pinned the imagination down too closely.  This dagger dance let in upon her a larger atmosphere, in which one human being was as nothing, even a goddess or a siren prodigal of enchantments was a little thing not without a narrow meanness of physiognomy.

She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by, garlanded with mystery and triumph:  War as a shape with woman’s eyes:  Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous dreams that must come true:  Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall to the outstretched hands of God:  Death as Life’s leader, with a staff from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky:  Savage Fecundity that crushes all barren things into the silent dust:  and then the Desert.