cted or in the flesh, it was this face whose peculiar
beauty clutched suddenly at his pulse. But it was not so much the
physical beauty that exerted the spell; nor was it, in this instance,
the attractiveness of the incomprehensible. For the man divined from
his contemplation of those features the nature of the woman, all her
complexities, and even her emotional fragilities. There came to him
the well-known conviction, "It's she that I've always been seeking."
At dawn, smothering under his mosquito net, with the din of Arab and
Hindu, Masai and Swahili voices drifting in through his shutters, his
first waking thought was of her.

He cut out the picture and kept it in his notebook.

It was there, against his breast, for many months. It traveled into
still stranger places. It passed, through Gallaland and Abyssinia,
into the country of the Blue Nile spearmen, across Darfur and Wadai,
where the Emir's men rode out in the helmets and chain mail that their
ancestors had copied from the Crusaders. It crossed the Sahara,
skirting the strongholds of the Senussia Brotherhood, penetrating the
wastes patrolled by the Tuaregs, ferocious camel riders whose mouths
were always muffled in black bandages. It went north to the steppes of
the Ziban, from which the tribe of the Ouled Nail scattered their
feather-crowned dancing girls from Ceuta to Suez. And in the Atlas it
entered the hill castles of Kabyles, whose unveiled, fierce-eyed,
red-haired women, drenched with half a dozen perfumes, and clattering
with silver, coral, turquoise and gold, were swifter than snakes with
their knives.

At last it was yellow and crinkled, that picture of the fair unknown,
which had become for him, in consequence of so many vivid reveries,
like a living companion.

There were days when he forgot her. Then suddenly, under those desert
constellations, he remembered her with a thrill. Or else, before the
tent of some nomad sheikh, all at once she fluttered from the notebook
to the silken carpet, on which girls with little brown feet had just
been making their cuirasses of gold coins leap to the music of
flageolets and drums.

And sometimes, though he had never before been superstitious, he felt
that this picture was a sort of amulet. For twice when he was in
danger, and there seemed to be small hope of his survival, there had
come to him the fortifying thought, "Not yet, because I haven't found
her in reality."

"Just a picture!" Lilla ut