By their attitudes they
seemed as if they wished to make themselves even with the ground, to
shrink into the space occupied by a grain of sand. Yet they were proud
in the presence of Allah, as if the firmness of their belief in him and
his right dealing, the fury of their contempt and hatred for those who
looked not towards Mecca nor regarded Ramadan, gave them a patent of
nobility. Despite their genuflections they were all as men who knew,
and never forgot, that on them was conferred the right to keep on their
head-covering in the presence of their King. With their closed eyes
they looked God full in the face. Their dull and growling murmur had the
majesty of thunder rolling through the sky.

Mustapha had disappeared within the mosque, leaving Domini and Androvsky
for the moment alone in the midst of the worshippers. From the shadowy
interior came forth a ceaseless sound of prayer to join the prayer
without. There was a narrow stone seat by the mosque door and she sat
down upon it. She felt suddenly weary, as one being hypnotised feels
weary when the body and spirit begin to yield to the spell of the
operator. Androvsky remained standing. His eyes were fixed on the
ground, and she thought his face looked almost phantom-like, as if the
blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint
set there by the sun. He stayed quite still. The dark shadow cast by the
towering mosque fell upon him, and his immobile figure suggested to her
ranges of infinite melancholy. She sighed as one oppressed. There was
an old man praying near them at the threshold of the door, with his face
turned towards the interior. He was very thin, almost a skeleton, was
dressed in rags through which his copper-coloured body, sharp with
scarce-covered bones, could be seen, and had a scanty white beard
sticking up, like a brush, at the tip of his pointed chin. His face,
worn with hardship and turned to the likeness of parchment by time
and the action of the sun, was full of senile venom; and his toothless
mouth, with its lips folded inwards, moved perpetually, as if he
were trying to bite. With rhythmical regularity, like one obeying a
conductor, he shot forth his arms towards the mosque as if he wished to
strike it, withdrew them, paused, then shot them forth again. And as
his arms shot forth he uttered a prolonged and trembling shriek, full of
weak, yet intense, fury.

He was surely crying out upon God, denouncing God for the evils th