lls, a display
of teeth that seemed to be swimming there unrelated to a head.

The babble of the camp--a continuous chattering, crooning, and
guffawing, blended with the indignant cries of monkeys. It was, she
thought, all one threnody of purely natural creatures, of which one
species, by some accident of structure and unplanned immunity, had
enlarged its powers of experiment and imitation to this point of
triumph--the kindling of fires, the eating of cooked food, the
gradually enhanced capacity for suffering.

"Are you religious, Parr?" she asked the little man who sat huddled in
a faded ulster, sucking at a cold pipe. What she meant was, "Do you
believe, poor traveler, that you have a soul--some spark that these
black savages share with you perhaps, but that those chattering monkeys
lack?"

His pinched, gray countenance took on a timid look.

"I hope so, ma'am," he stammered, and tried to assume an expression of
befitting dignity.

"So you can pray without laughing at yourself!"

Her cold voice was replete with the bitterness of those who have got
from suffering nothing except rancor, as if at some vast hoax.

Parr was frightened by this glimpse into her disillusionment; and
prayer, which he himself had abandoned in his childhood, seemed
suddenly worthy of his timid championship. He mumbled something about
faith; he had, it appeared, seen some of its achievements. He recalled
the faith of strong men, which had accomplished prodigies; the
confidence of youth----

"And when one is old and weak? So it is all a physical phenomenon?"

When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want
of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes
fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching
her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the
tent-fly. But Parr, not utterly crushed, proffered faintly that he
knew he could not argue with the likes of her, being without education,
having taken life as it came, mostly obeying orders----

"Like Hamoud," she commented. "Hamoud has taken life as it came,
obeying the orders of fate. What is your word for resignation, Hamoud?
The word that brought you across the ocean into Mr. Verne's service,
and then back across the ocean into this place?"

"Mektoub," he vouchsafed, after lowering his eyes so that she should
not see the flames in them. "And why not, since none can hope to
escape his d