rp of
a minstrel who has come from afar to chant the epic of some already
mythical character. His faded coat was wrinkled round the neck; his
collar was split at the folds; and a faint smell of iodoform mingled
with Lilla's perfume, which a Viennese artist in odors had concocted
especially to "match her temperament."

"One time in Nyasaland----"

"Not the jungles!" she protested, flinching back.

"The desert, then?" he ventured.

He showed Lawrence to her in the desert that is called Erg, the waste
of shifting sand; and in the desert called Chebka, a wilderness of
boulders; and in the desert called Hamedan, the bleak plateaux where
there are no springs of water; and in the desert called Gaci, the
oases, rich with date palms, pomegranates, and oleanders. The caravan
routes unrolled before her, at sunset. The hills turned to ashes of
rose; the sand dunes to heliotrope; and against the sky appeared a
caravan of many thousands of camels, bearing on their humps,
impoverished from hard travel, the traffic that passes between the
great oases--the rugs and the oil, the sacks of dates and boiled
locusts, and, in the closed palanquins, the women destined to new
slaveries. A great calm descended at dusk; the tents of dingy brown
hair surrounded the sheik's pavilion, which was topped with a plume.
The air was filled with odors of camels, of cous-cous, of sagebrush.
The camp fires of desert grass flared in the night wind.

He was always well received by the caravan chiefs, the sheiks of the
oases, the heads of the desert monasteries--drowsy towns with arcaded
streets and tunnels of mud, into whose holy precincts came no echoes of
war. He had the knack of endearing himself to fierce men, by something
in his character at the same time inflexible and kindly, by a sympathy
that embraced that other religion, or at least its intrinsic spirit, so
that he could repeat the Fatihah with good grace before the tombs of
saints. Even the Tuaregs, the untamed bandits whose faces were always
muffled in black, received him into their tents of red dyed leather,
where he joked with their wives and daughters, the "little queens," who
were accustomed to ride alone, fifty miles on their trotting camels, to
visit a sweetheart.

"But my picture was with him," thought Lilla. "I was with him there,
just as he, through his picture, though I had never seen him, was with
me. In our longings, that crossed in space, we were already united.
Even th