e gleamed a profound
phosphorescence, as from a decaying ocean. The coast hung like a mass
of inky vapor above the fitful shimmer of the surf from which was
wafted a faint, interminable booming that suggested the roaring of
lions and the thunder of savage drums.

Lilla emerged from her cabin, crossed the deck, and laid her hands upon
the softly quivering rail. Close beside her the darkness gave up a
ghost--Hamoud, who also stood silent, gazing toward the coast. His
robes exhaled an odor of musk and aloes.

"Africa, madam," he uttered at last in a voice that lost itself in the
clinging darkness and the smothering heat.

And soon a languid ecstasy stole over him.

His heart swelled as he drank in, at the same time, the exhalations of
his native land and the faint fragrance of her hair. In the darkness
he perceived with his mind's eye both her beauty and the
well-remembered beauty of the spice isles. The palm-crowned hills
encircled the lapis-lazuli harbor of Zanzibar, on whose waters he saw
himself sailing, with this mortal treasure, in a handsome dhow, the
tasseled prow shaped like the head of the she-camel sent from heaven to
the Thamud tribesmen, the mast fluttering the pennants of ancient
sultans. Then the dhow with the camel prow became a panoplied camel,
on which he and she were being borne away to Oman, the land of his
fathers, which he had never seen. There, in those rugged mountains, he
would become, as his ancestors had been--vigorous of will, fierce and
great, triumphant in war and love.

For a long while he stood there trembling gently in unison with the
ship, thought linking itself to thought, and image to image, his
fancies growing ever more bizarre yet ever more distinct, as though he
were inhaling, instead of the faint perfume of her hair, the smoke of
hasheesh.

But she had forgotten him.

CHAPTER LIV

In the thick sunshine, below the cloudlike mountains, sandbanks
unrolled themselves between the mouths of the equatorial rivers flanked
by mangrove forests. At last, in the depths of a bay of glittering,
brownish water, the port town appeared, a mass of red-tiled roofs
spread along the gray seawall that suggested a fortress.

Through sandy thoroughfares bordered with acacia trees rode hollow-eyed
Europeans in little cars, which half-naked negroes pushed along a
narrow-gauge railway. The languor of those recumbent figures was
abruptly disturbed, at the apparition of a woman clad in