r three dignified
Arab men bathed their feet in preparation for the afternoon prayer, and
tired travellers from a distance slept upon mats of woven straw, spread
on tiles like a pavement of precious stones, or dozed in the little
cells made for the students who came in the grand old days. The sons of
Islam were reverent, yet happy and at home on the threshold of Allah's
house, and Stephen began to understand, as Nevill and Josette already
understood, something of the vast influence of the Mohammedan religion.
Only Madame de Vaux remained flippant. In the car, she had laughed at
the women muffled in their haicks, saying that as the men of Tlemcen
were so tyrannical about hiding female faces, it was strange they did
not veil the hens and cows. In the shadowy mosque, with its five naves,
she giggled at the yellow babouches out of which her little high-heeled
shoes slipped, and threatened to recite a French verse under the
delicate arch of the pale blue mihrab.

But Stephen was impressed with the serene beauty of the Moslem temple,
where, between labyrinths of glimmering pillars like young ash trees in
moonlight, across vistas of rainbow-coloured rugs like flower-beds, the
worshippers looked out at God's blue sky instead of peering through
thick, stained-glass windows; where the music was the murmur of running
water, instead of sounding organ-pipes; and where the winds of heaven
bore away the odours of incense before they staled. He wondered whether
a place of prayer like this--white-walled, severely simple despite the
veil-like adornment of arabesques--did not more tend to religious
contemplation than a cathedral of Italy or Spain, with its bloodstained
Christs, its Virgins, and its saints. Did this Arab art perhaps more
truly express the fervour of faith which needs no extraneous
elaborations, because it has no doubts? But presently calling up a
vision of the high, dim aisles, the strong yet soaring columns, all the
mysterious purity of gothic cathedrals, he convinced himself that, after
all, the old monkish architects had the real secret of mystic
aspirations in the human heart.

When Josette and Nevill led the way out of the mosque, Stephen was in
the right mood for the tomb of that ineffable saint of Islam, Shaoib ibn
Husain el Andalousi, Sidi Bou-Medine. He was almost ready to believe in
the extraordinary virtue of the earth which had the honour of covering
the marabout's remains. It annoyed him that Madame de Vaux s