. Then he brightened:

"Me know," he said, suddenly springing from the boat. "Me take you
my house. Sister show you the way: sister carry mister's things."

The Englishman stared for a moment into the eager, intelligent
face, strangely handsome, though in ebony. After all, do we not
think a well-carved table beautiful, although sometimes, even
because, it is in ebony? Then _he_ brightened:

"Very good; take me to your house, and let me see your sister," he
said good-humouredly; adding inwardly, "If she's anything like you,
she'll be the very thing for the camera."

They turned from the cool, rolling, billowy water inwards towards
the desert and the huts of Omdurman, and the heat rose up and
struck their cheeks each step they took.

* * * * *

Merla stood that morning at her hut doorway looking out--out
towards the river she could not see, for the banks rise and the
desert falls slightly behind them. She stood on the threshold, and
the sun beat on her Eastern face, and showed it was very good. She
was sixteen, and, like her brothers who ran the naphtha launch for
the English, she was straight and erect, tall and lithe and supple,
with a wonderful stateliness and majesty of carriage, though she
had never been taught deportment nor attended physical culture
classes. Merla was beautiful, with the perfect beauty of line that
belongs to her race, and possessed the straight, high forehead, the
broad, calm brow that tells of its intelligence and nobility. She
knew, however, nothing of her own beauty. She never cared for
staring into the little squares of glass that the girls of the
village would buy in the market-place, nor coveted the long strings
of blue glass beads that the Bishareens brought in such numbers to
sell in Omdurman; nor did it specially please her to lay the beads
against her neck, and see them slide up and down on her smooth skin
as she breathed, though her companions would thus sit for hours
cross-legged before their little mirrors, breathing deep to note
how their beads rose and fell and glistened in the light.

Merla loved much better to steal out of the hut at night, when the
oil-lamp smoked against the mud wall and the air was heavy, into
the pure calm darkness of the desert, and gaze up at the stars, and
listen to the far-off tom-toms beating fitfully against the
stillness. And if ever any little coins came into her possession,
it seemed unkind to spend them on glas