ed slowly, and she saw, with amazement, that there were
tears in his eyes. He did not thank her or say a word.

A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches
that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow
him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot
gazelles lying in a patch of sunlight by a wired-in fowl-run. Domini
went after him, and Androvsky and honest Mustapha--still vigorously
proclaiming his own virtues--brought up the rear. They came into the
most curious garden she had ever seen.

It was long and narrow and dishevelled, without grass or flowers. The
uneven ground of it was bare, sun-baked earth, hard as parquet, rising
here into a hump, falling there into a depression. Immediately behind
the cabaret, where the dead gazelles with their large glazed eyes lay
by the fowl-run, was a rough wooden trellis with vines trained over it,
making an arbour. Beyond was a rummage of orange trees, palms, gums and
fig trees growing at their own sweet will, and casting patterns of deep
shade upon the earth in sharp contrast with the intense yellow sunlight
which fringed them where the leafage ceased. An attempt had been made
to create formal garden paths and garden beds by sticking rushes into
little holes drilled in the ground, but the paths were zig-zag as a
drunkard's walk, and the round and oblong beds contained no trace of
plants. On either hand rose steep walls of earth, higher than a man, and
crowned with prickly thorn bushes. Over them looked palm trees. At the
end of the garden ran a slow stream of muddy water in a channel with
crumbling banks trodden by many naked feet. Beyond it was yet another
lower wall of earth, yet another maze of palms. Heat and silence brooded
here like reptiles on the warm mud of a tropic river in a jungle.
Lizards ran in and out of the innumerable holes in the walls, and flies
buzzed beneath the ragged leaves of the fig trees and crawled in the hot
cracks of the earth.

The landlord wished to put a table under the vine close to the cabaret
wall, but Domini begged him to bring it to the end of the garden near
the stream. With the furious assistance of honest Mustapha he carried it
there and quickly laid it in the shadow of a fig tree, while Domini and
Androvsky waited in silence on two straw-bottomed chairs.

The atmosphere of the garden was hostile to conversation. The sluggish
muddy stream, the almost motionless trees