felt that there was something morbid in his horror of the crowd, and
the same strength of her nature said to her, "Uproot it!"

Their camp was pitched on the sand-hills, to the north of the city near
the French and Arab cemeteries. They reached it only when darkness was
falling, going out of the city on foot by the great wall of dressed
stone which enclosed the Kasba of the native soldiers, and ascending
and descending various slopes of deep sand, over which the airs of night
blew with a peculiar thin freshness that renewed Domini's sense of being
at the end of the world. Everything here whispered the same message,
said, "We are the denizens of far-away."

In their walk to the camp they were accompanied by a little procession.
Shabah, the Caid of Amara, a shortish man whose immense dignity made
him almost gigantic, insisted upon attending them to the tents, with his
young brother, a pretty, libertine boy of sixteen, the brother's tutor,
an Arab black as a negro but without the negro's look of having been
freshly oiled, and two attendants. To them joined himself the Caid of
the Nomads, a swarthy potentate who not only looked, but actually was,
immense, his four servants, and his uncle, a venerable person like
a shepherd king. These worthies surrounded Domini and Androvsky, and
behind streamed the curious, the envious, the greedy and the desultory
Arabs, who follow in the trail of every stranger, hopeful of the crumbs
that are said to fall from the rich man's table. Shabah spoke French
and led the conversation, which was devoted chiefly to his condition
of health. Some years before an attempt had been made upon his life by
poison, and since that time, as he himself expressed it, his stomach
had been "perturbed as a guard dog in the night when robbers are
approaching." All efforts to console or to inspire him with hope of
future cure were met with a stern hopelessness, a brusque certainty of
perpetual suffering. The idea that his stomach could again know peace
evidently shocked and distressed him, and as they all waded together
through the sand, pioneered by the glorified Batouch, Domini was
obliged to yield to his emphatic despair, and to join with him in his
appreciation of the perpetual indigestion which set him apart from the
rest of the world like some God within a shrine. The skittish boy, his
brother, who wore kid gloves, cast at her sly glances of admiration
which asked for a return. The black tutor grinned. And t