about ten feet above the
level of the deserted street, and even as she looked, saw the door of
the room she had just left being pushed back inch by inch as the dying
girl, strengthened by love and agony, dragged herself slowly into the
room in which lay the man she worshipped asleep.

CHAPTER XI

Ten o'clock!--half-past!--eleven!

The usual noises of a night in an Egyptian town were at their height.

The distant and never-ceasing shuffling of slippered or naked feet on
stone, or sand, made a dull accompaniment to the sharper notes of men's
voices crying their wares of sticky sweetmeat or fruit, and the barking
and growling of innumerable dogs.

Muffled ejaculations could be heard, little gurgles of laughter, which
in Egypt, thanks be to Allah, do not degenerate into giggles, the swish
of a whip in the shadow, followed by a woman's cry, and through all,
above all, unfinished catches of music.

All kinds of humans, including tourists, writers, European officials
and desert dilettanti, have affixed every kind of adjective to Egypt's
music.

Ethereal, melancholy, wailing, plaintive, nebulous, and pathetic are
but a few. Why--why try to tie a label to something which slips from
the fingers even as they close about it? Why _try_ to describe that
which cannot be described? There is, or was, a certain line which in
the heat of an Egyptian noon, or the stillness of an Egyptian night,
when the first notes of a human voice, or stringed instrument, or
rudely cut pipe-reed reach the ears, would creep out of some memory
cell.

One loved the vagueness of those words:

"Out of the nowhere, into here!"

Loved the infinite space they opened up with their aloofness and
indefiniteness, until, alas! they took concrete shape when chosen as
title to the picture of a robust, Royal Academy, Fed-on-Virol looking
babe, which doubtless, when trying to grab some passing Olympian
butterfly, fell off the lap of the Gods into a sitting position upon
Mother Earth.

Also, one thinks of that mist wraith which on a cloudless day stretched
across some mountain's breast, lies lightly upon the air, with
diaphanous ends coming out of and going into nothingness; for in just
such manner does the music fall across an Egyptian day or night.

These catches of music have no end, and no beginning; they rise, linger
a moment, and are gone, leaving behind them an indescribable loneliness
of soul, and a longing to stretch one's hand back