t covers a beauty remembered from old dreams. These rags will
become cloth of gold on the body of the Sultana of Sultanas. I shall
sit while still alive in those gardens beneath whose shades the rivers
flow--those charming abodes that are in the Garden of Eden. This, and
not Paradise, shall be the great bliss."

She poured the few drops of perfume into her palms, and held out her
hands.

"Ah, Hamoud----"

"Do not speak," he protested, catching her hands in his. "It is this
moment for which I became a servant, did things that you will never
know of, and followed you here."

She sat in the blood-stained robe, in the dark forest vibrating from
the drums and rustling with stealthy beasts, lost, bereft of beauty and
faith, yet aware of one more miracle--realizing that even now, out of
her poverty, she could still bestow happiness.

CHAPTER LXIV

At daybreak they went on.

With his shoulders bowed under a distended sack and a canvas water
bottle, and with his rifle at trail, he guided her feeble steps along
the path. Now and then he besought her to rest. She shook her head.

Bees hummed above them in the festoons of flowers. Purple parrots with
scarlet crests went fluttering away. At noon they paused, ate some
biscuits, then pressed ahead, she driven by her obsession and he, as he
believed, by the purposes of Allah.

Just as a rosy warmth was invading the upper foliage, Hamoud pushed her
from him, and struck at the ground with his gun butt. He had stepped
upon a puff adder.

He sat down to examine his ankle, on which four tiny pinpricks were
visible. He looked up with a fixed smile.

There it lay, a little, crushed reptile, a trivial fragment of matter,
its triangular head flattened out, its scales of pinkish gray, black,
slate, and lemon yellow already turning dull. Yet the man, a rational
being, with power for good as well as evil, for love as well as hatred,
was even now dying from it. But his face expressed the fortitude that
was at the same time the blessing and the curse of his religion, as he
said to her:

"Go. I do not wish you to see me die this death."

She knelt down to peer at those almost imperceptible punctures.

"From that?"

As she spoke he seized his leg above the knee, to choke back the first
excruciating pang. Rocking backward and forward, he began to repeat
scattered texts from the Koran:

"The recompense of the life to come is better, for those who have
believed a