alms from being engulfed in a yellow tide. It was the
marabout's own private oasis, and brought him in a large income every
year. But everything was the marabout's. The woman on the roof was sick
to death of his riches, his honours, his importance, for she was the
marabout's wife; and in these days she loved him as little as she loved
the orange garden he had given her, and all the things that were hers
because she was his.

It was very still in the Zaouia of Oued Tolga. The only sound was the
droning of the boys' voices, which came faintly from behind iron
window-gratings below, and that monotonous murmur emphasized the
silence, as the humming of bees in a hive makes the stillness of a
garden in summer more heavy and hot.

No noises came from the courts of the women's quarters, or those of the
marabout's guests, and attendants, and servants; not a voice was raised
in that more distant part of the Zaouia where the students lived, and
where the poor were lodged and fed for charity's sake. No doubt the
village, across the narrow river in its wide bed, was buzzing with life
at this time of day; but seldom any sound there was loud enough to break
the slumberous silence of the great Zaouia. And the singing of the men
in the near oasis who fought the sand, the groaning of the well-cords
woven of palm fibre which raised the buckets of hollowed palm-trunks,
was as monotonous as the recitation of the Koran. The woman had heard it
so often that she had long ago ceased to hear it at all.

She looked westward, across the river to the ugly village with the dried
palm-leaves on its roofs, and far away to the white-domed city, the
dimpling oases and the mountainous dunes that towered against a flaming
sky; then eastward, towards the two vast desert lakes, or chotts, one of
blue water, the other of saltpetre, which looked bluer than water, and
had pale edges that met the sand like snow on gold. Above the lake of
water suddenly appeared a soaring line of white, spreading and mounting
higher, then turning from white to vivid rose. It was the flamingoes
rising and flying over the chott, the one daily phenomenon of the desert
which the woman on the roof still loved to watch. But her love for the
rosy line against the blue was not entirely because of its beauty,
though it was startlingly beautiful. It meant something for which she
waited each evening with a passionate beating of her heart under the
orange-coloured robe and the chain of am