of sand?"

"No, Madame."

"He reads your past in sand from the desert and tells what your future
will be."

The man made no reply.

"Will you pay him a visit?" Domini asked curiously.

"No, Madame. I do not care for such things."

Suddenly she stood still.

"Oh, look!" she said. "How strange! And there are others all down the
street."

In the tiny alley the balconies of the houses nearly met. No figures
leaned on their railings. No chattering voices broke the furtive silence
that prevailed in this quarter of Beni-Mora. The moonlight was fainter
here, obscured by the close-set buildings, and at the moment there was
not an Arab in sight. The sense of loneliness and peace was profound,
and as the rare windows of the houses, minute and protected by heavy
gratings, were dark, it had seemed to Domini at first as if all the
inhabitants were in bed and asleep. But, in passing on, she had seen a
faint and blanched illumination; then another; the vague vision of an
aperture; a seated figure making a darkness against whiteness; a second
aperture and seated figure. She stopped and stood still. The man stood
still beside her.

The alley was an alley of women. In every house on either side of the
way a similar picture of attentive patience was revealed: a narrow
Moorish archway with a wooden door set back against the wall to show a
steep and diminutive staircase winding up into mystery; upon the highest
stair a common candlestick with a lit candle guttering in it, and,
immediately below, a girl, thickly painted, covered with barbarous
jewels and magnificently dressed, her hands, tinted with henna, folded
in her lap, her eyes watching under eyebrows heavily darkened, and
prolonged until they met just above the bridge of the nose, to which a
number of black dots descended; her naked, brown ankles decorated with
large circlets of gold or silver. The candle shed upon each watcher a
faint light that half revealed her and left her half concealed upon her
white staircase bounded by white walls. And in her absolute silence,
absolute stillness, each one was wholly mysterious as she gazed
ceaselessly out towards the empty, narrow street.

The woman before whose dwelling Domini had stopped was an Ouled Nail,
with a square headdress of coloured handkerchiefs and feathers, a pink
and silver shawl, a blue skirt of some thin material powdered with
silver flowers, and a broad silver belt set with squares of red coral.
She was sitting u