cant, and this peculiar activity seemed full of some
extraordinary and even horrible meaning. She watched it with straining
eyes.

Count Anteoni took the glasses from Smain and looked through them,
adjusting them carefully to suit his sight.

"_Ecco!_" he said. "I was right. That man is not an Arab."

He moved the glasses and glanced at Domini.

"You are not the only traveller here, Madame."

He looked through the glasses again.

"I knew that," she said.

"Indeed?"

"There is one at my hotel."

"Possibly this is he. He makes me think of a caged tiger, who has been
so long in captivity that when you let him out he still imagines the
bars to be all round him. What was he like?"

All the time he was speaking he was staring intently through the
glasses. As Domini did not reply he removed them from his eyes and
glanced at her inquiringly.

"I am trying to think what he looked like," she said slowly. "But I feel
that I don't know. He was quite unlike any ordinary man."

"Would you care to see if you can recognise him? These are really
marvellous glasses."

Domini took them from him with some eagerness.

"Twist them about till they suit your eyes."

At first she could see nothing but a fierce yellow glare. She turned the
screw and gradually the desert came to her, startlingly distinct. The
boulders of the river bed were enormous. She could see the veins of
colour in them, a lizard running over one of them and disappearing into
a dark crevice, then the white tower and the Arabs beneath it. One was
an old man yawning; the other a boy. He rubbed the tip of his brown
nose, and she saw the henna stains upon his nails. She lifted the
glasses slowly and with precaution. The tower ran away. She came to the
low cliff, to the brown huts and the palms, passed them one by one,
and reached the last, which was separated from its companions. Under it
stood a tall Arab in a garment like a white night-shirt.

"He looks as if he had only one eye!" she exclaimed.

"The palm-tree man--yes."

She travelled cautiously away from him, keeping the glasses level.

"Ah!" she said on an indrawn breath.

As she spoke the thin, nasal cry of a distant voice broke upon her ears,
prolonging a strange call.

"The Mueddin," said Count Anteoni.

And he repeated in a low tone the words of the angel to the prophet: "Oh
thou that art covered arise . . . and magnify thy Lord; and purify thy
clothes, and depart from uncleanness."

The c