of Arabs, whose flowing draperies almost concealed
his ugly European clothes. On the wall immediately behind him was a
brilliantly-coloured drawing of a fat Ouled Nail leering at a French
soldier, which made an unconventional background to his leaning figure
and sunburnt face, in which there seemed now to be both asceticism and
something so different and so powerful that it was likely, from moment
to moment, to drive out the asceticism and to achieve the loneliness of
all conquering things. This fighting expression made Domini think of a
picture she had once seen representing a pilgrim going through a dark
forest attended by his angel and his devil. The angel of the pilgrim
was a weak and almost childish figure, frail, bloodless, scarcely even
radiant, while the devil was lusty and bold, with a muscular body and a
sensual, aquiline face, which smiled craftily, looking at the pilgrim.
There was surely a devil in the watching traveller which was pushing
the angel out of him. Domini had never before seemed to see clearly
the legendary battle of the human heart. But it had never before been
manifested to her audaciously in the human face.

All around the Arabs sat, motionless and at ease, gazing on the curious
dance of which they never tire--a dance which has some ingenuity,
much sensuality and provocation, but little beauty and little mystery,
unless--as happens now and then--an idol-like woman of the South, with
all the enigma of the distant desert in her kohl-tinted eyes, dances
it with the sultry gloom of a half-awakened sphinx, and makes of it a
barbarous manifestation of the nature that lies hidden in the heart of
the sun, a silent cry uttered by a savage body born in a savage land.

In the cafe of Tahar, the Kabyle, there was at present no such woman.
His beauties, huddled together on their narrow bench before a table
decorated with glasses of water and sprigs of orange blossom in earthen
vases, looked dull and cheerless in their gaudy clothes. Their bodies
were well formed, but somnolent. Their painted hands hung down like the
hands of marionettes. The one who was dancing suggested Duty clad in
Eastern garb and laying herself out carefully to be wicked. Her
jerks and wrigglings, though violent, were inhuman, like those of a
complicated piece of mechanism devised by a morbid engineer. After
a glance or two at her Domini felt that she was bored by her own
agilities. Domini's wonder increased when she looked again at t