his face and body wrapped in
a white cloth. "Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when
she sat up in bed with a scream.

Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the
bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered
the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of
other voices broke like a wave.

"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round
the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but,
kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net,
to take her hand and press it to his brow.

"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to
you."

"And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp.
"Oh, Hamoud, and dreams?"

In the pearly light, beneath the cloudy net, in the air that was
fragrant with the odors of soap and cologne, her upturned countenance
and swelling throat gave forth a gleam as if of flesh transfigured by
love instead of grief. He felt himself falling through space into a
bottomless anguish. He clutched at the thought, "Yet who knows His
designs?" and hung in that void alive, his secret still locked in his
breast, the delicious pain of her daily condescension still assured to
him.

"Ah, if you were of my faith you would have heard that life is all a
dream, that there is no reality except paradise and hell."

He rose, and stole away from paradise to hell.

CHAPTER LVI

In the dawn Parr hobbled down the line of yawning porters, checking the
reapportionment of burdens. The machilla men, still nibbling at chunks
of cold porridge, approached with the hammock swinging from their
shoulders.

The safari resumed its march.

Its course was northwest, through jungles of bamboo, round the rims of
marshes, past forests filmed with the blue and yellow of convolvulus.
The mountains remained apparently as far away as ever, now indistinct
behind the heat mist of the lowlands, now disappearing beyond the
rainstorms that swept across the plateaux like the robes of colossal
gods.

The safari passed leopard traps, graves decked with broken pottery and
little banners of rags, then, circling fields of maize, entered a
village. The huts stood in a ring inside a rude stockade. The village
headman advanced, bending forward from the waist and scraping first one
foot and then the other. He made obeisance before the machilla,