replied, 'and we will talk.'

"My resolution was taken in a moment. As this girl had been thrown into
my arms, in this manner, I would keep her; I would make her a kind of
slave-mistress, hidden in my house, like women in a harem are. When the
time should come that I no longer cared for her, it would be easy for me
to get rid of her in some way or another, for on African soil those sort
of creatures almost belong to us, body and soul, and so I said to her:

"'I wish to be kind to you, and I will treat you so that you shall not be
unhappy, but I want to know who you are and where you come from?'

"She saw clearly that she must say something, and she told me her story,
or rather a story, for no doubt she was lying from beginning to end, like
all Arabs always do, with or without any motive.

"That is one of the most surprising and incomprehensible signs of the
native character--the Arabs always lie. Those people in whom Islam has
become so incarnate that it has become part of themselves, to such an
extent as to model their instincts and modifies the entire race, and to
differentiate it from others in morals just as much as the color of the
skin differentiates a negro from a white man, are liars to the backbone,
so that one can never trust a word that they say. I do not know whether
they owe that to their religion, but one must have lived among them in
order to know the extent to which lying forms part of their being, of
their heart and soul, until it has become a kind of second nature, a very
necessity of life, with them.

"Well, she told me that she was the daughter of a _Caidi_ of the _Ouled
Sidi Cheik_, and of a woman whom he had carried off in a raid against the
Touaregs. The woman must have been a black slave, or, at any rate, have
sprung from a first cross of Arab and negro blood. It is well known that
negro women are in great request for harems, where they act as
aphrodisiacs. Nothing of such an origin was to be noticed, however,
except the purple color of her lips, and the dark nipples of her
elongated breasts, which were as supple as if they were on springs.
Nobody who knew anything about the matter, could be mistaken in that. But
all the rest of her belonged to the beautiful race from the South, fair,
supple and with a delicate face which was formed on straight and simple
lines like those of a Hindoo figure. Her eyes, which were very far apart,
still further heightened the somewhat god-like looks of this dese