uin, and
set the palanquin upon a running camel, and, while the dancers shrilled
their lament amid the sands, they bore her away into the darkness of the
dunes towards the south and the tents of her own people.

The jackals laughed as she went by.

But the hedgehog's foot was left lying upon the floor of her chamber.
Not one of the dancers would touch it.

That night I was in the cafe, and, hearing of all these things from
Kouidah, the boy, I went into the court, and gathered up the trinket
which had brought a woman to the great silence. Next day I rode on
horseback to Tamacine, asked to see the marabout and told him all the
story.

He listened, smiling like the rising sun in an oleograph, and twisting
in his huge hands, that were tinted with the henna, the staff with the
apple-green ribbons.

When I came to the end I said:

"O, holy marabout, tell me one thing."

"Allah is just. I listen."

"If the scorpions had slept with a veiled woman who held the hedgehog's
foot, how would it have been? Would the woman have died or lived?"

The marabout did not answer. He looked at me calmly, as at a child
who asks questions about the mysteries of life which only the old can
understand.

"These things," he said at length, "are hidden from the unbeliever. You
are a Roumi. How, then, should you learn such matters?"

"But even the Roumi----"

"In the desert there are mysteries," continued the marabout, "which
even the faithful must not seek to penetrate."

"Then it is useless to----"

"It is very useless. It is as useless as to try to count the grains of
the sand."

I said no more.

Mohammed El Aid Ben Ali Tidjani smiled once more, and beckoned to a
negro attendant, who ran with a musical box, one of the gifts of the
faithful.

"This comes from Paris," he said, with a spreading complacence.

Then there was within the box a sounding click, and there stole forth a
tinkling of Auber's music to _Masaniello_, "Come o'er the moonlit sea!"

End of Project Gutenberg's Halima And The Scorpions, by Robert Hichens

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HALIMA AND THE SCORPIONS ***

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