rter kept together,
somewhat humble, yet laughing and happy. Slender, coffee-coloured youths
drove miniature cows from Morocco, or tiny black donkeys, heavily laden
and raw with sores, colliding with well-dressed Turks, who had the air
of merchants, and looked as if they could not forget that Tlemcen had
long been theirs before the French dominion. Bored but handsome officers
rode through the square on Arab horses graceful as deer, and did not
even glance at passing women, closely veiled in long white haicks.

It was lively and amusing in the sunlight; but just as the two friends
were ready to go out, the sky was swept with violet clouds. A storm
threatened fiercely, but they started out despite its warning, turning
deaf ears to the importunities of a Koulougli guide who wished to show
them the mosques, "ver' cheap." He followed them, but they hurried on,
pushing so sturdily through a flock of pink-headed sheep, which poured
in a wave over the pavement, that they might have out-run the rain had
they not been brought to a sudden standstill by a funeral procession.

It was the strangest sight Stephen had seen yet, and he hardly noticed
that, in a burst of sunlight, rain had begun to pelt down through the
canopy of trees.

The band of figures in brown burnouses marched quickly, with a sharp
rustling of many slippered feet moving in unison, and golden spears of
rain seemed to pierce the white turbans of the men who carried the bier.
As they marched, fifty voices rose and fell wildly in a stirring chant,
exciting and terrible as the beat-beat of a tom-tom, sometimes a shout
of barbaric triumph, sometimes a mourning wail. Then, abruptly, a halt
was made in the glittering rain, and the bearers were changed, because
of the luck it brings Arab men to carry the corpse of a friend.

Just in front of the two Englishmen the body rested for an instant,
stretched out long and piteously flat, showing its thin shape through
the mat of woven straw which wrapped it, only the head and feet being
wound with linen. So, by and by, it would be laid, without a coffin, in
its shallow grave in the Arab cemetery, out on the road to Sidi
Bou-Medine.

There were but a few seconds of delay. Then the new bearers lifted the
bier by its long poles, and the procession moved swiftly, feverishly, on
again, the wild chant trailing behind as it passed, like a torn
war-banner. The thrill of the wailing crept through Stephen's veins, and
roused an old, ch