ke the cry of a voice
lifted up in protest against the approach of an unknown, but dreaded,
fate. Then the wind came again with a stronger moaning and a lengthened
life, not yet forceful, not yet with all its powers, but more tenacious,
more acquainted with itself and the deeds that it might do when the
night was black among the vast sands which were its birth-place, among
the crouching plains and the trembling palm groves that would be its
battle-ground.

Batouch looked grave as he listened to the wind and the creaking of the
palm stems one against another. Sand came upon his face. He pulled the
hood of his burnous over his turban and across his cheeks, covered his
mouth with a fold of his haik and stared into the blackness, like an
animal in search of something his instinct has detected approaching from
a distance.

Ali was beside him in the doorway of the Cafe Maure, a slim Arab boy,
bronze-coloured and serious as an idol, who was a troubadour of the
Sahara, singer of "Janat" and many lovesongs, player of the guitar
backed with sand tortoise and faced with stretched goatskin. Behind them
swung an oil lamp fastened to a beam of palm, and the red ashes glowed
in the coffee niche and shed a ray upon the shelf of small white cups
with faint designs of gold. In a corner, his black face and arms faintly
relieved against the wall, an old negro crouched, gazing into vacancy
with bulging eyes, and beating with a curved palm stem upon an oval
drum, whose murmur was deep and hollow as the murmur of the wind, and
seemed indeed its echo prisoned within the room and striving to escape.

"There is sand on my eyelids," said Batouch. "It is bad for to-morrow.
When Allah sends the sands we should cover the face and play the ladies'
game within the cafe, we should not travel on the road towards the
south."

Ali said nothing, but drew up his haik over his mouth and nose, and
looked into the night, folding his thin hands in his burnous.

"Achmed will sleep in the Bordj of Arba," continued Batouch in a low,
murmuring voice, as if speaking to himself. "And the beasts will be
in the court. Nothing can remain outside, for there will be a greater
roaring of the wind at Arba. Can it be the will of Allah that we rest in
the tents to-morrow?"

Ali made no answer. The wind had suddenly died down.

The sand grains came no more against their eyelids and the folds of
their haiks. Behind them the negro's drum gave out monotonously its echo
o