moisture. At sunset she descended from the machilla to give
Hamoud a look of astonishment, while replying:

"No, I am well."

Yet she cast a look of dread at the rising tent, thinking of the hours
of sleeplessness, of appalling thoughts on the borderline between
nightmares and flashes of fever.

Now and then, as she escaped shivering from the hot bath, she lost hold
of her new strength.

"If you knew!" she whimpered.

The lost, safe life rose before her. She saw against the green tent
walls the painting by Bronzino, the jeweled perspective of Fifth Avenue
at night, Fanny Brassfield's necklace sparkling in the blaze of the
opera house. The music of waltzes mingled with the strains of David's
tone poem; and she smelled at the same time the tanbark of the horse
show, the pastilles at Brantome's, and the flowers surrounding the
marble warrior and the marble nymph. She was seized with panic, on
realizing the remoteness of security.

"Where am I? Africa! But why?"

She stood motionless, aghast at her inability to remember why she was
here.

Hamoud's voice came to her from beyond the curtain:

"There is going to be a shauri, a talk with these porters of yours."

"Ah, my God! What is it now?"

Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:

"Rebellion."

She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.

Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:

"Madam, all is ready."

She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed,
her eyes as cold as ice.

On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their
rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great
semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire
shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had
turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low
murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds
of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above
this spectacle.

Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla
bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the
sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal
and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance,
persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from
the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.

An aska